Modernizing the retail sales process
Designing a client relationship platform
Challenge
This retailer’s business is based on “relationship selling” - staff aren’t hired to fold sweaters and ring purchases, rather, all colleagues are expected to maintain a book of clients and drive their own business.
However, this model hadn't been working well for a while, and the gap between the highest and lowest performers was growing. Our client knew that legacy technologies and manual processes were holding colleagues back, but there were also bigger issues to solve with the relationship selling process itself.
The lowest performing colleagues had weaker conversation and selling skills, which meant they struggled to connect with customers on the floor, acquire new clients, and engage them to shop again. They rarely got to engage in active selling, and often missed their sales goals.
The highest performers had stronger conversation and selling skills, and more product expertise. But their real advantage was higher spending clients, which allowed them to spend most of their time focused on a few, high value relationships.
The retailer knew they needed a new technology platform to help colleagues understand sales performance and communicate with clients. But adding a new technology to a broken process would not solve the underlying issues.
Goal
Our client asked Amplify to design a transformative selling platform that would enable colleagues to acquire, effectively engage, and grow customer relationships that drive sales… and reimagine the selling process using that technology.
But even though the client wanted to create a tech-enabled process - including using automation and AI to offload work from colleagues - it was critical not to lose the one-to-one human interactions that create strong relationships and generate loyalty.
Amplify conducted qualitative research with new and experienced colleagues to deeply understand the relationship selling process, their pain points with the current systems, and how they would use a new selling platform in their daily workflows. We then conducted research with clients themselves to understand what the real customer value of the relationship is, and how client relationships deepen over time.
Using these insights, our team worked with the client to create new platform feature concepts and test them with colleagues. We stitched these together in a vision of the future relationship selling process that showed new colleague workflows to meet and add clients, recommend and sell inside and outside of the store, and use data on the colleague’s own performance to improve.
Solution
Using these insights, our team worked with the client to prototype feature concepts and test them with colleagues. We stitched these together in a vision of the future relationship selling process that showed how colleagues would use the product within their workflows to support selling and grow client relationships.
Amplify designed a new selling process and supporting features that included:
Connection and Discovery
- Frictionless features to add a client to the book on the floor, at the register or remotely.
- Prompts that facilitate discovery conversations and consistent documentation of new client information
- Automation that ensures consistent "after care" post purchase
Outreach and Recommendations
- A daily prioritized outreach dashboard that takes the work out of knowing which clients to reach out to and why
- Prompts to customize one-to-one and one-to-many communication that invites a two way dialogue with clients
- Smart product recommendations that focus sellers’ time on styling during selling conversations
Sales Insights and Growth
- Insights that guide sellers on how to best spend their time engaging the clients who are likeliest to shop
- Data on the seller's sales history and client demographics and needs
- Insights that guide managers on seller skill and performance to guide coaching
