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.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 28th, 2009 at 12:10 pm and is filed under Mystery Shopping and Selling Skills. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.