Five Selling Games To Increase Your Sales
Americans are very competitive and we love sports and other competition. Games and contests in a jewelry store sparks new excitement into the staff and atmosphere and thus will increase sales and selling techniques. Think about how we all get excited watching football, baseball, even bowling! Games and contests will breathe new life into even your “old race horses”.
The purpose of games is to increase sales but to also improve selling behaviors and sales statistics. Sometimes the only difference between a good sales person and a terrific one is their excitement. That feeds over into the customer who gets excited about buying their new piece of jewelry from your store. Games give instant gratification and feed a frenzy unlike plain old commission.
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Pass The Buck
We played this game a lot and it worked great. Almost every Saturday we played this game and sometimes varied the amount. You tack a $20 bill to the bulletin board. First person to make a sale today gets the $20 bill (includes repairs!). The next person who makes a bigger sale takes the $20 from the previous person and holds onto it. The person with the biggest sale at the end of the day gets to keep the $20! This draws a lot of excitement.
On some occasions I’d make it two $20 bills stapled together. You can vary this by substituting the currency with a Gift certificate you bought from Outback Steakhouse or other fine restaurant.
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A Buck A Try On
In store visits I institute the Pass The Buck which is to be used no more than once a week and overuse of any game gets boring, so we should vary them. This store changed the pass the buck to this one with dramatic results.
Did you know it’s “against the law” for someone walking into a jewelry store to touch our products without permission? Think about it. If you bought a car, you could sit in it and smell the leather long before being approached by a sales person. You can slide your arm into a mink coat (yes its chained, but you still can). Even if there’s only one shoe on display you can slip it on. But in jewelry a customer must “ask permission” to try on jewelry. “Can you unlock that case please and show me this ring?” If jewelry sat on the counter like scarves and shirts I promise you sales would increase (along with theft). So your job is to get our goods out of the “vault” and onto the customer’s fingers, neck and arms.
You need someone who’s always on the floor for this one; works best with a sales manager. Here’s the plan. Every time a sales person gets the customer to try on a piece of jewelry the staff member gets a $1. Not right then and there-at the end of the night. For each additional piece the customer try’s on the sales person gets another buck. It doesn’t matter if they buy it; they just have to try it on.
The customer can’t gaze at the ring with their finger holding it, it must be on her hand. Bingo-a buck! “Would you like to see a matching bracelet that would look great together”? If it gets on the lady’s arm bingo-another buck!
The store that tried this gave the dollar bills out each evening in “ceremony” while pulling the cases and sales for the month went up 30%!
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Balloon Pop
You set out specific goals for a weekend or week. It doesn’t have to just “increase sales, it could easily be:
Sell a watch
Sell a red dot (old) item
Any repair over $50
Any sales over $1000
You make a list of prizes that you’ll give away. It can range from monetary rewards, to dinner, a movie, a day off, food, music CD, appliance, etc. Write them on a piece of paper, fold them and insert in a balloon and blow them up. Tape them to a board and when a sales staff achieves a goal let them pop the balloon and get their prize. The popping sound itself drives excitement! If the dart misses a balloon they lose their turn. They have to have good aim as well. J
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Jewelry Store Poker
Getting rid of old merchandise is my mantra and it should be yours as well. Buy a deck of cards. Then on paper make a list of aged items in the store you want to move. Short description and sku number and vary the merchandise by prices. Cut up the paper and tape or glue one item onto the middle of a playing card. Place all cards with description face down on a table and let each staff member choose a set number of cards.
As each sales person sells their items they turn in their cards and they are tacked to a board with their name on the card. You can have two prizes for this contest. Firstly the person who turns ALL of their cards gets a fantastic prize, which we hope is everyone. For those who don’t sell all of their items give a smaller prize for the single person who sells the most of their cards. This contest can run over a week and you’ll find playing cards are easy to carry.
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Bag of Goodies
Type up a list of sales goals you want your staff to achieve. They can be far and wide in what you expect. Some examples would be:
Sell an item over $xx.xx
Sell an aged item
Sell an add on
Sell a custom design
Sell a customer who you called to come into the store
. Send out 25 hand written thank you notes in a day.
Now that you’ve made your list we move onto another fun part. Don’t you like shopping for gifts for friends and family? You might go out and buy 20-40 items for this contest and they could range from lottery tickets, candy bars, small toiletry items, gift certificates, movie tickets, lottery tickets, cameras, dinners, etc. Gift wrap them in boxes and put all items in one great big “Hefty” bag.
As each sales person achieves a goal, you hold the bag open and let them pull out a prize and open it. To get the chance for another prize they have to achieve another sales goal.
You could very easily amend this game to be team oriented. If you have the staff you could divide the staff into teams and each time the team achieves a goal a member of the team pulls a prize from the bag and everyone on the team gets that same prize. You could have a team outing as a prize or it might be that each member gets to grab a prize for themselves, one after the other. Many teams with three people on a team would mean a winning team lets all three people at once grab their own different prize.
Games add excitement and will increase sales and change selling behaviors.
Have a great season
David Geller
Director of Profit