There is a strong argument to measure selling skills with mystery shopping. Two stores side by side were both selling the same digital camera. A customer (one of our staff) was attracted to one of them by a catalogue, but the retailer next door won the sale!

The camera cost $504.85. The $504.85 was lost because a do-nothing sales person did not sell. Either he had not been trained to sell, or he chose not to. Dissatisfied with the sales person’s lack of product knowledge our staff member went to the competitor next door and purchased the camera.

Although it’s unlikely that this exact scenario would occur very often, fifty similar lost sales (for whatever reason) in a month equates to…

$25,242.50

Mystery shopping is not the cure for poor selling, but a mystery shop strongly focused on sales skills will at least tell you if there is a problem.

I found out about the power of specificity when a store manager telephoned to complain about a mystery shopping report. The mystery shopper had said that suggestive selling had not been done, but the manager disagreed. He claimed his staff member should get the points for suggestive selling because he was present at the time and had heard his staff member say, “Would you like anything else?”

In my view, “Anything else,” should forever be banned from the retail lexicon. It is not a suggestive sell and its use should score zero in a mystery shopping report.

McDonalds’ sales folk never say, “Would you like anything else?” What they do say of course, is, “Would you like fries with that?” “Fries” is very specific. The power of the suggestive sell is in the use of the product name – fries in this case. The memory of previous pleasant consumption evokes a yes response, or perhaps a no if the customer’s memory is of waistline expansion. On the other hand, “Anything else? “ is not specific. It evokes nothing. The answer to “Anything else,” is most often NO by default because the customer cannot think of any “thing.”