Give Your Team One Product to Sell This Week

How many products do you sell?

Hundreds?

Possibly thousands?

Now think about your team.

How many of those products could every member of your team confidently sell to a customer?

Not just point them towards it.

Actually talk about it.

Explain what makes it good, what it goes with and why they think the customer should try it.

It's probably fewer than we'd like.

So here's a really simple exercise you can try this week.

Pick one product

Choose one product you genuinely want to sell more of.

It could be a sausage.

A cheese.

A pie.

A chutney.

A bottle of sauce.

It doesn't particularly matter what you choose. The important thing is that you choose just one.

Then spend five minutes with your team.

Let everyone taste it. Talk about what makes it good and give them the basic information they need to have a natural conversation with a customer about it.

I'd concentrate on three things:

• What makes it good?

• What does it go with?

• Why should the customer try it?

That's it.

You don't need a training course. You need five minutes and something worth talking about.

Make it this week's product

Now give that product a bit of attention.

Put it somewhere customers will notice it.

Sample it if you can.

Feature it on your social media.

Include it in your customer email.

But most importantly, get the whole team talking about it.

Not with a rehearsed sales pitch.

Just confidently and naturally.

“Have you tried these?”

“These are brilliant with…”

“We tried these this morning and…”

That sort of genuine recommendation can be incredibly powerful in an independent food shop because your team aren't just there to put products through a till.

Their knowledge is part of what makes shopping with you different.

Give your team confidence

Sometimes we tell our teams that we need to sell more.

But that's a pretty vague instruction.

Sell more of what?

And what should they actually say?

Giving everyone one product to concentrate on removes all of that.

They've tasted it.

They know the story.

They know what goes with it.

And they've got something specific to talk about.

Suddenly, selling becomes a lot easier.

Then count them

This is the bit I wouldn't miss.

Before you start, find out how many you sold last week.

Then run your one-product focus for seven days and count them again.

Did it make a difference?

If it did, brilliant.

Next week, pick another product.

Over time you're not only selling more products. You're gradually building a team with better product knowledge, more confidence and more reasons to start useful conversations with customers.

And all you've done is focus everyone's attention on one thing at a time.

Sometimes we make retail improvement far too complicated.

This one isn't.

One product. One week. One team behind it.

See what happens.