Today’s shoppers demand a great in-store experience. In fact, 78% of shoppers rank sales associate product knowledge as their #1 top desire when shopping in stores. 60% of millennials and Gen Z say that interacting with knowledgeable sales staff can solidify their purchasing decisions. Training programs to enhance associate education are a must for every store and every brand selling their products in those stores. That’s because, as you know, sales associates are the front line and the face of retail. They have the power to make or break the sale with potential customers.
You need to ensure that any associate selling your products is informed, empowered, inspired and incentivized. Our data shows that retail associates with even a basic level of knowledge about your brand and products can make a vast difference in increasing sales. Stores sell more products when they have a higher percentage of well-informed associates. That’s a fact, not an opinion.
Store Associate Training Benefits
ThirdChannel mixes and matches passionate Brand Reps with future-state retail tech that’s designed to visualize, track, monitor and analyze a store’s environment. Our Brand Reps on the ground are trained to familiarize themselves with every store your products are sold in so they can report back insights, tips and recommendations on how to best spread the love of your brand among sales associates and customers.
ThirdChannel offers improvements to the traditional 3PL solution…reliable information on what is happening in each market…more accurate and real-time reporting systems with live feeds and reporting generated instantly.
We needed to be sure our brand was represented the way we wanted and that there was continuity of presence at retail. We needed help with our launches and we couldn’t be in all places at once. ThirdChannel Brand Reps are more like brand ambassadors that are within the demographic; not just a merchandiser.
Nobody brought the digital platform that ThirdChannel brought and nobody let us be part of the hiring process of the Brand Representatives like ThirdChannel does.
It’s incredibly challenging to get the assortment right in the door, then to have the right marketing materials to support the sell through at scale, in so many different sport verticals, and get it into all the doors at scale in under 30 days.
We didn’t know how our new [running shoe] line was going to do, but we knew we had support from ThirdChannel Brand Reps. By the end of 2017 it was one of [our retailer’s] biggest-selling models for the year. Some weeks it passed 20% sell-through. One week it hit 27%.
A store manager asked if we had recently changed demonstration providers and I explained that we had. He only had wonderful things to say about his new ThirdChannel Brand Rep and that the knowledge, attitude, and confidence is a world of change from the previous person.