Sales Personnel Training – An Integrated Framework for Indian Brick-and-Mortar Retailers

Abstract

In brick-and-mortar retailing, sales personnel play the most important and complex rolewhereby they are the ones who are connected to consumers directly on a real-time basis.Besides, to this complexity retailers in India find it difficult to recruit well-trained salespersonnel who is an all-rounder. It is observed that majority of bricks-and-mortar retailers inIndia assume: (a) sales personnel in the store are required to assist consumers in finding theright product at the earliest; (b) consumers who walk into their stores have a clearunderstanding of their needs and based on their needs they enquire sales personnel in the storeabout a specific product/category/brand; (c) sales personnel attrition rate in stores is generallyhigher owing to lower pay scale; (d) product-specific training has to be given the highestpriority; (e) designing a common training program relevant to all types of sales personnel isdifficult, and most importantly; (f) existing training efforts have not yielded in any significantpositive impact on the store profitability. Such assumptions and misconceptions have createda predisposition and mindset in sales personnel and sales organization, and they believe thatthey are delivering the best results. In this exhaustive study, we have attempted to design anew sales personnel training framework that attempts to integrate a majority of the elementssuch as training content, trainee, trainer, training time frame in addition to firm-level andconsumer-level evaluation techniques. In this twelve months-long research work we haveanalyzed a select brick-and-mortar retailer’s existing training framework, designed a newintegrated sales personnel training framework, applied it toa select group of experimentalstores to derive insights from the experimentation and check validity and reliability of theproposed framework. Results have demonstrated that more than 35 percent of the consumersrepeat store visit rate could be determined by (a) store profitability that is a positive motivatorto sales personnel to perform better; (b) walk-in conversion rate that is directly affected by thesales pitch of sales personnel which is directly affected by the continuous training efforts; (c)sales personnel monetary incentive earnings that are directly affected by their performancethrough improved learnings; and (d) sales personnel attrition rate that is a result of overallsatisfaction of sales personnel.