Small Business Competitive Advantage: When All Employees Know Everything About the Product
April 4, 2010 by Team Building Activity Tips
Filed under Team Building Training
Have you ever been at a big-box retailer where after the obligatory greeter you’re pretty much forgotten? I must have had hundreds of experiences by now where I was disinclined toward the sale because either an employee couldn’t lead me to the product I was looking for; or even if they did in rare cases, they couldn’t tell me what I wanted to know about it.
Generally speaking, this is big businesses’ loss and small business’ gain. What really makes this work for small firms, though, is having in place employee leadership development practices that result in each and every person knowing all there is to know about pretty much every product in the store (or service, if that’s what you offer).
On the Fast Company blog last week, Simma Lieberman described how these practices play out at a Canadian retailer called Everything Wine. Its Founder and CEO Paul Clinton explained that,
Every employee goes through wine education. We want our employees to have a good time, and look forward to coming to work, and we want our customers to have a good time, and enjoy doing business with us.
Because of the increased sales potential of this employee engagement model, many of our Top Small Workplaces rely on it. Bill Loskutoff, President and CEO of California-based Jackson’s Hardware, gives his take on what this looks like and the results it brings his store in the video below. Watch especially starting at 1:39 (click here if you can’t see the video in your blog feed):
To what extent are all of your employees knowledgeable about your product/service offerings?
View full post on Winning Workplaces
