How to ensure a stress-free, profitable Christmas season

It's just 30 days until the unofficial start of the Christmas retail sales period which starts an engine and doesn’t stop till the New Year! For some retailers, the Christmas season can last up to 4 months.

Here in the Southern Hemisphere, we have to remember this isn’t just the start of the Christmas sales period but the start of the summer holidays.

If you personally are already dreaming of the summer break, then your company should be planning for it. December never moves from being the busiest time for retailers, yet preparing for Christmas has become a much longer process and we see companies continuing to put it off and then scramble to get prepared.

Prior planning prevents poor performance

These months of preparation are critical to a retailer's success in December. It can represent up to 29% of annual sales.

This week we want to encourage you to begin setting your intentions for your summer sales period and focus on making it as pain-free and profitable as possible.

Begin setting your intentions for your summer sales period. One of the top things on your list of intentions is to have skilled seasonal sellers.

You need to feel confident leaving your most valued customers with your Christmas casual staff, knowing they’re having the same experience in-store as they’d have with your most seasoned sales assistants.

At such a crucial sales time, you shouldn't have just anyone on your shop floor. The experience your customers have with your staff at this particularly stressful time of year can be the difference between them purchasing with you or with your competitors.

Begin reviewing your schedules and casual staff requirements and share job postings as soon as possible. Keep in mind that Christmas casual staff are working in the retail space for the first time. This type of seasonal-role is often the first step in the industry and the people you’re recruiting could end up staying around longer than 8 weeks. Make sure you’re asking the right questions and pre-vetting applicants before inviting them along for an interview.

How can you make sure they have basic selling skills before their first shift?

With casuals being often new to the industry you need to ensure they have a baseline knowledge of sales techniques and are efficiently determining customers needs to ensure you’re selling them the right solution.

To do this we are introducing the RedSeed Peak Trade programme. It is currently available for just $39.95 per user. Hosted on our world-class cloud-based learning platform, we can onboard and train your Christmas casuals before they even hit the sales floor. All you need to do is hire the staff. We do the rest.

It takes an hour to work through and your staff will be armed with the right tools to handle stressed out Christmas shoppers , maximise the number of customers served efficiently, but also establish the needs of each customer to sell them the right solution. Your casuals can work through the programme and the five activities on ANY device, anywhere!

‍Enter your details here and we’ll send you a digital pack with everything you need to know about what is covered in our Peak Trade programme, along with full details of our cloud-based learning capabilities.

“Navigating the course was so easy. There was a lot of information in small manageable chunks and I felt so comfortable opening sales and establishing customers needs quickly. I would definitely recommend the Peak Trade programme to anybody hiring Christmas casuals.”