How to measure your sales staff's performance

Your sales staff are key to your success this holiday season. They’re the ones interacting with shoppers, and are one of the primary drivers of in-store customer spending.

Let’s explore how you can get more visibility on your staff’s performance, and whether or not they’re driving results for your store on a shift-to-shift basis. To do that, we’re going to look at how you can measure the volume of sales they generate and how many tasks they complete.

Your POS retail analytics tools can help you access most of the stats you’ll need to perform these simple calculations.

Let’s get started!

1. Shopper-to-staff ratio

Having more well-trained sales staff typically yields higher sales. Why? Because more employees lead to faster customer service and shorter wait times. But there’s a fine line between being over and under-staffed.

Your shopper-to-staff ratio shows you whether your scheduling model is working for or against you. Calculate it using this formula:

Why measure your shopper to staff ratio?

A strong shopper-to-staff ratio indicates lower wait-times and a potential for more sales. Compare these two metrics for each day of the holidays to see which shopper-to-staff ratio worked the best in terms of revenue. Tracking this metric in real-time will help you figure out if you’re scheduling the right amount of employees.

2. Conversion rate

Calculating your in-store conversion rate lets you see how often shoppers that enter your store actually make a purchase. It’s one of the tried and true methods for seeing how good your staff is at selling. Calculate your conversion rate using this formula:

How to improve your conversion rate?

Your conversion rate is directly impacted by the performance of your sales staff. If the numbers show that you’re not converting at a high rate, consider reassessing how much staff you need per day, determining who your best salespeople are with employee performance reports, and optimizing your training programs to prioritize implementing real sales tactics and increasing efficiency.

Hold staff accountable

You’ve crunched all the numbers, now you can put those insights into action. Communicate your findings with your staff and hold them all accountable to the benchmarks you’ve established.

Tip: consider having a quick sales target staff huddle before their shifts start. Sharing performance information enables them to hit their sales targets.

Whether an employee is full-time, part-time or seasonal, each category should have realistic sales targets for the volume of hours they work. Each employee category’s targets should maximize your store’s sales per square foot, average units sold per transaction, and how much each employee sells per hour. Your POS system analytics can give you these insights and enable you to better motivate your staff and hold them accountable.