Review and Check
Unlike a teacher in a school, you do not have much opportunity to use quizzes and exams to see if your instruction was effective. Instead, you can observe selling situations on the floor, and ask your assistants and department managers to do the same. Notice especially if the points you covered in your meetings are being applied. To some extent, your sales figures will tell you if your instruction has produced results. Good meetings generally produce good selling, and good selling generally produces good sales figures.
Don't be disappointed, however, if your message didn't get through to everyone in its entirety. This is natural. It's a rare teacher who produces a class of students with only A grades.
Count on re-teaching some or all of what you have already presented. At your next meeting, say, "Let's take a minute to review..." And when you do review, do not imply that anyone is at fault - either you or the sales people - if you have to re-teach. Simply indicate that the point is so important that you want to stress it once more.
Varying Your Format
A tremendous variety of formats for departmental meetings is available to you. Try to get away from just talking and holding up garments on hangers. Imagine how many such talks your twenty-year veterans have lived through! Try instead:
- Dialogues between you and an assistant or sales person in which you compare old and new fashion trends, or take turns pointing out the fashion features of a group of new garments
- Quick-change demonstrations of how accessories can alter or emphasize the look of a garment
- Modeling of garments or accessories by sales people
- Question-and-answer sessions, in which you invite questions from the floor - first taking the precaution to plant a few to start things moving
- Question-and-answer sessions, in which you distribute question cards to sales people and require each to read and answer the questions she has drawn
- Sessions at which you use audio-visual devices - flip charts, slides, films, videotapes, or whatever else is available from store or outside sources
- Outside speakers - vendors, editors of trade and consumer publications, store executives, even an articulate and well-informed customer
- Skits, prepared or spontaneous, in which sales people act out selling situations such as, for example, customer resistance to a new look or length
- Seminar-type sessions, in which you act as moderator and a few crackerjack sales women act as panelists to present ideas and answer questions
- Demonstrations of how to accessorize outfits in keeping with a current look -the accessorizing being done at the meeting or in advance of it, by you, your assistant, or some of the sales people, with opportunity for discussion and possible criticism of each outfit
- Presentation of a fashion article from a major magazine, or a fashion ad from a major store, with discussion of how the department's merchandise illustrates or differs from the material presented
- Selection by individual sales people of the styles they would show to customers of various types, or in response to typical customer requests
- Joint presentation and discussion of coordinated merchandise with other departments
- Tour of other fashion departments in the store, in each of which the sales people will seek out and inspect merchandise to coordinate with what your department sells
- Invitation to sales people of other departments to a fashion presentation arranged by your girls.
Don't worry if some of your ideas "bomb". Even the most successful actor or playwright has an occasional dud. Just keep trying to make your meetings alive, different, and interesting. You'll find yourself looking forward to them - and so will the sales people.
