Sales Strategy
Jimmy DeGroot: You Can’t Afford Not to Coach April 10, 2025 (0 comments)
Green Bay, WI--Tyler changes my oil in my Enclave and undergoes regular training and coaching to keep up with the latest models. Last week I was asking him about his training and he said, “We do it because the cost of not training could not only be our jobs, but potentially thousands in repairs for our company.” As a business owner, your cost of not training and coaching your team is primarily in lost sales.
Most managers, while out on the sales floor, don’t spend time coaching their team, but rather sell against them as a part of the sales team with a sales goal. While this type of management is necessary for lower volume stores, if leadership focuses more on growing the entire team with sales assistance and team building, your store can see exponential growth in culture and sales. “We don’t have time to coach our people.” This is a common reply when jewelers call us. They’re typically too busy trying to hit their own sales goals while performing cursory management duties such as scheduling and inventory management.
If you want to get a great start at a management plan, you can start today by writing recipes for all the activities that you are asked to do over and over again that your staff can do with a little training. Here’s a list of examples: changing a watch battery in all types of timepieces, weekly inventory re-order of fast sellers, a protocol for dealing with old inventory, a checklist for opening and closing, a recipe for counting the till and making deposits. If it’s a job you can do, it’s a job you can train someone else to do. When you’ve written a good number of recipes, hold your team accountable to achieving these tasks regularly and allow them to fail. You failed when you started. A quick tell that there’s something you need to train your folks on is if you think to yourself, “Oh I’ll just do it! It’ll get done right and quicker!” I’m as guilty as anyone on this.
More next week on how to turn from a manager in title only to a real sales floor coach. This is the only way I know to truly grow your team to greater things.
James (Jimmy) DeGroot is a professional jewelry sales and operations trainer from the jeweler’s side of the counter. Having been in management and the jewelry business for over 20 years, Jimmy offers weekly training to jewelers nationwide via the Train Retail website. Jimmy is an AGS titleholder and specializes in training relevant and timely methods for jewelry teams. He can do a full training on making Bridal Presentations the best they can be, among many other regular training options. Contact Jimmy at jimmy@trainretail.com or call 920-492-1191.
