Retail Success through Alliance Relationships
- Effective Community Based Cross-Promotions (830 Words)
- Retail Niche, Finding Yours
- Eliminate Your Customer’s Emotional Obstacles to Buying with the Retail Success Triad
- Community Partnering For Greater Retail Success (1526 Words)
- Retailers, Show Your Customers Just How Much You Value Them—25 Ways To Do It
- When 20 Bucks & Ego Is More Important than a Decade of Customer Loyalty (1864 words)
- Brand Construction or Brand Destruction? (2951 words)
- It Doesn’t Work for You, But You Want Me To Buy It? (741 words)
- Lost Opportunity, Are You Guilty? (1038 words)
- Oh, So You Want Me To Ship It To the Manufacturer? (822 words)
- Partner Selling: 8 Steps to Serve Your Customers & Be Rewarded (1363 Words)
For the retailer finding it difficult, in both time and money to effectively promote, this is the program for you. Share both the work and the wealth as you succeed.
- Learn new ways to think about promoting your business.
- Learn how to find cross-promotion partners.
- Learn about past successful cross-promotions.
- Discover the cross-promotion possibilities with both your competitors and non-competitors.
- Cooperative purchasing strategies are revealed.
- Learn how to keep your alliance relationship healthy and thriving.
Customer Service Tips
Double Your Strength Overnight With Outrageously Successful Relationships
Quality relationships have always been the cornerstone for success in all the varied functions a specialty retailer faces. Today, it is an absolute necessity for outrageously successful relationships (OSRs) in all specialty retail. As today’s specialty retailer vies for differentiation rather than disintermediation, relationship success is the deciding factor.
Retailers must develop OSRs in five areas of their business: alliances with competitors and/or other community merchants, alliances with their suppliers, loyalty alliances with customers, emotional ownership alliances with employees and a personal mission alliance with themselves. When these five alliance relationship areas are in place, the natural retailer achieves total organizational partnering.
These relationships are achieved through the functional secrets that include: relationship bank deposits, relationship value updates, same-level communications and the platinum rule. What’s in it for the retailer are benefits that include: positioning, co-branding strategies, cross-promotions, access to new markets and customer segments, preferred supplier status, buying parity with chains, employees with an emotional ownership in the success of the specialty retail enterprise, increased customer retentions, and access to additional solutions for success.
Rigsbee revels the success strategies necessary in the specialty retail environment. Rather than just survive, why not thrive? Rigsbee’s Relationship Rules have made a difference in many specialty retail industries. They will work for you too.
- Documented Value Added
- Customer Partnership Positioning
- Customer Emotional Triad
- Subliminally Connecting with Customers
- Company Image
- Low and No Cost Promotions
- Free Publicity
- And Much More
This seminar is most effective as either a half-day or full-day workshop.
Retailers Are a Dime-a-Dozen, How To Become the Merchant of Choice
business as market driven rather than widget driven. Become a partner to your customers. Get on their side of the table rather than being seen as an adversary. In this session, Rigsbee will take through your positioning journey. When finished, you will be armed with the necessary tools to enjoy the partnership positioning in the minds of your current and potential customers.
- Who are my customers?
- Where are my customers?
- How do my customers find me?
- How do my customers perceive value (benefits) when selecting a merchant with which to enjoy a relationship?
- How do my customers prefer to do business?
- Who is my competition; direct and indirect?
- What are the benefits that the customers of my competition believe they are receiving from my competitor(s)?
- What is it about my company/store that really gets me excited?
- What is my uniqueness?
Do Your Employees Act as if the Coffeemaker is Broken?
In this seminar, Rigsbee reveals the most important management principle retailers must use. Rigsbee's national employee loyalty survey reveals the answer that every retailer must possess. Do you want your employees to have an emotional ownership in the success of your business, even though they are not an owner? Do you want them to take risks and make intelligent decisions in your absence? Learn how to develop a powerful team dedicated to moving your business forward. Develop relationships at work, that work!
The PARTNER Model is the conduit to your success. Discover the magic in permission cards. Explore low cost employee recognitions and how to use Rigsbee's successful employee recognition certificate system. Learn which recognitions have legs (long-term value) and which are a flash in the pan (little value). Your employees will be as excited about your business as are you. And, if you're not excited, you will be.
The PARTNER Model:
- Tell the Truth
- Net of Safety
What Are They Saying Behind Your Back? -Perceptions of Retail Employees
From his 16 years of selling to retailers, Rigsbee shares insights, perceptions and complaints from retail employees. When you clearly understand how your employees see their world, you can help them to have an emotional ownership in the success of your enterprise. Keeping good employees in today's economic environment is more difficult than ever. Learn several new strategies and tactics for keeping your people contented, motivated and working for you.
The New Era of Retailer-Supplier Cooperation
Learn what your competitors are learning, how to give and/or ask for the best Total Value Package available. Suppliers learn how to turn around their sell/buy paradigm through understanding the needs of retailers. Through intelligent sales offerings and purchasing practices, resources can be redirected to create more usable value for the supply chain. Learn the ABCs (adversarial, barometric & complementary) of retailer-supplier relationships.
Since They're in Your Store, May as Well Sell 'em More
Add-on sales can increase both your total volume and more importantly, your profitability. Help your customers get what they need and want, before your competitor does. Regardless of how long you have been in retail, there are always new ideas to adapt to your situation.
Tips for Add-On Sales
- Teach your employees through your example. They will repeat what they see, not what you say.
- Care about your customers and what they want rather than what you want to move.
- Engage customers in meaningful conversations, then ask open ended questions. Learn about all their needs.
- Listen to what your customers say rather than simply think about your next pitch line.
- Explain the value your products deliver--how the products make their life better.
- If possible, put your products in the hands of your customers.
Partnership Selling--Prospects as Buying Partners
Both outside and inside sales persons must build a solid relationship before trying old school or hard closes. Customers of today want help in both selection and feeling good about their purchasing decisions. Consumers and purchasers want sales people to get on their side of the table, to see need from the purchasing side. Sales people learn the secrets of giving customers the value they want by first learning what value is from the eye of the beholder.
- Pain determination
- Assess their situation
- Translate features into benefits
- Neuro-Linguistic Programming skills
- Emotional connection
- Remove objections
- Solve their problems
Rigsbee's retail experience includes: general merchandising (S. H. Kress & Co.), clothing (Mr. Motrin's Fine Clothing for Men), mountaineering, cross-country skiing and downhill skiing (Yosemite Park & Curry Company). Rigsbee also worked at the S. H. Kress & Co. Southern California Distribution Center. From 1974 to 1990, Rigsbee was involved with sales & distribution to retailers. Rigsbee pioneered the optics clinic for sporting goods stores in California and regularly presented those clinics throughout the 1980s. Rigsbee's first retail article appeared in the Action Sports Retailer magazine in 1990. Since, he has had hundreds of his articles published. Since 1991, Rigsbee has been a full-time author and speaker, regularly delivering seminars to both large and small retail clients.