How should we set goals and incentives? Remove hurdles first— then tap vendor support. Before setting sales goals, identify barriers and use vendor partnerships to strengthen training and incentives. l TIFFANY WILLIE:“ Before we set goals, I try to see how can I remove all of the hurdles that they are facing. Once we’ ve been able to identify those hurdles, we then look at how we can support the team. We work with our vendors, we work with our partners, because there’ s quite a few of them that we work very closely with to help drive these initiatives. It’ s not just about setting the number and saying Go sell. It’ s really about giving them the support, the education and the tools they need. We review those every quarter and see what’ s working and what’ s not.”
Seasonal games beat constant spiffs. Rotate fun, time-limited incentives to keep energy up and avoid burnout. l MEGAN JASPER:“ We have a goal— our guest service team needs to be at $ 20 retail per client ticket on average. It’ s something very easy for them to understand and track. They have a bonus, so if our guest service team gets to that, they get one percent of their total sales for the month. It’ s a little way for them to feel inspired and motivated around retail, and that it’ s not just in the technicians’ hands. And then for our technicians, we look at percentage of guests leaving with home care. You might see 10 people today, and the goal is three of them are leaving with home care. We don’ t really care what they buy, as long as they’ re buying something. Because we believe that the relationship you’ re building through guests purchasing from you is building trust and retention moving forward.”
TOWN HALL RECAP
Make goals memorable and actionable. Use simple language that keeps expectations clear across the team. l CAROL PHILLIPS:“ This is my short answer: one butt, two bottles. One butt in the chair, two bottles go out the door. What I find is that a lot of service providers get a little wacky with numbers, and I just found if I make it one butt, two bottles go out the door, literally everybody listening today could at least double their retail. Now, is everybody going to do it? No— but if I train the team, it’ s about the relationship. If you do great hair and they don’ t have the product at home, and then they struggle with their hair, the first thought is, You gave me a bad haircut. Right? It’ s not they have crappy product in the shower. It just reframes it a little bit.”
“ The hairdresser, the esthetician— they were the original influencer, and we’ ve let social media take it away from us.”
Tie incentives to results that matter to ownership. Connect retail goals to metrics that demonstrate hotel-wide value. l MATTHEW PUNSALAN:“ Our department associates are engaged, and we use those metrics to engage. Then we think about, What’ s the retail revenue per occupied room? How are we making an impact on the entire hotel? Because we need buy-in from ownership and from other departments so they can feed those customers to our department. The second thing is, How are things going off the shelf? Does it have a 70 percent or greater shelf life, or does it not? If it doesn’ t, then we need to rethink and move SKUs into that real estate to get things moving. That’ s really how my mind goes— How can we get everyone involved, and how are we moving the dial?” n
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