Prepare your assistant for this aspect of the job by sharing your knowledge of fashion, merchandise, selling, and promotion. Discuss the looks you are featuring, and why, and how they fit into the store wide picture. If there are some currently talked-about looks that you reject, discuss these, too.
Go into considerable detail about the merchandise itself, how it is made, and why it is worth the price. Your assistant will need more technical knowledge than a sales person does, because your assistant, like you, may have to handle unusual questions or complaints from customers.
Prepare your assistant to train the sales people by having her cooperate actively with you in planning staff meetings and developing reference files, bulletin boards, and other aids.
Invite suggestions as to what to cover at meetings, based on the assistant's observation of what sales people appear most to need. Normally, your assistant will spend more time on the selling floor than you can, and is therefore better able to observe actual customer reaction. Now and then, let your assistant run a departmental meeting. Be present as an observer on the first occasion or two. Point out in private what else she might have done to be more authoritative or persuasive.
Delegate to your assistant those aspects of sales supervision that she can execute better because she can spend more time on the selling floor:
- answering questions from sales people and customers
- coaching individual sales people who seem to need help
- assigning routine stock duties
- scheduling days and hours of work
- observing and reporting outstandingly good or poor sales performance.
Require your assistant to sell and be on the selling floor as much as possible. Your own time for observing customers may be increasingly restricted as you become more deeply involved with your merchandising tasks.
Your assistant, sharing your viewpoint as a merchandiser, is in a unique position to make and report such observations to you. You need those observations! To increase the value to you of what your assistant sees and reports, and to encourage your assistant to notice the things you want noticed, make a point of discussing reports of customer behavior thought fully.
Teach your assistant to observe and evaluate customer attitudes from the merchandising point of view -your point of view.
Your Assistant as Promoter
When you have an upcoming ad, your assistant can take over the responsibility for:
- checking status of merchandise for you a specified number of days before the ad breaks, so that either you or your assistant can follow up on vendor, marking room, transfers to branches, or whatever else is necessary to get the advertised goods into stock on time.
- notifying sales people and branches
- routing advance copies of the ad to branches; posting them in the downtown store
- lending garments for window display and making out loan slips for them
- developing, either independently or under your instructions, departmental displays
- following-up as needed on sign shop, display props, merchandise needed from other departments to complete the displays
- reviewing with sales people key points of the fashion, the merchandise, and the ad, on the morning that the ad appears.
Discuss results and their probable indications with your assistant. A thorough post-mortem will help both of you to improve the future promotional performance of your department.
The extent to which you use your assistant in promotion depends upon the qualifications each of you has. Try not to thrust creative aspects of the work upon a person who is better suited to the routine tasks - or to stifle a creative assistant by withholding too completely the opportunity to exercise her talents.
Safe procedure: Assign only routine tasks at first. Invite and discuss suggestions about the creative phases of the work before you make any assignments in this area. When you do assign the writing of an ad request or the construction of a departmental display, make sure to oversee what is done, the first few times, until you and your assistant both feel confidence in her ability.
Your Assistant as Watchdog
Use your assistant to help you watch for and close the many profit leaks that can exist in a department. Among those on which she is most likely to contribute are:
- accuracy in writing up price changes and transfers
- double- and triple-checking any price changes made on the selling floor
- verifying prices of items returned or found in stock without price tickets
- spotting and reporting non-starters and slow sellers for that strategic first markdown
- spotting and reporting lows and outs on fast or steady sellers
- accuracy and promptness in handling charge-backs to vendors, also in following up on loan merchandise, etc.
- reporting to you any period in which your department appears overstaffed (and costing too much in selling salaries) or under staffed (and costing too much in lost sales.)
You and your assistant share responsibilities and have the common goal of wanting to see your department prosper. You have much to gain, as she does, from establishing an open and friendly relationship.
There is, however, one important barrier between you that must be kept in mind - the "status barrier", as it has been called for want of a better name.
Your status is that of the executive in charge. You are the one who must either make the decisions or stand accountable for any decisions made in your behalf by your assistant.
If you permit her to make a decision and it is a poor one, you remain responsible. Your assistant can pass responsibility back up to you, but you cannot pass it down to her.
Reaping the Benefits
You gain in several ways from developing and using an assistant effectively. Among them:
- Two people who work well as a team can accomplish three or four times as much as one person alone. The accomplishments go to your credit.
- Your store is hungry for promotable executives. The fact that you are contributing to the development of a potential future buyer will be to your credit.
- One of the great but seldom mentioned satisfactions of an executive job is the pleasure of knowing one has aided a younger person to get a good start on her career. Give yourself that satisfaction.
