Well, hey, everybody. It’s Bob. And in last week’s episode of Real Retail TV, we explored the importance of taking care of your team and taking care of yourself and why self management and team management is so important so that when you come down the stretch, you and your team come down the stretch that you’re fresh and you’re enthusiastic and you’re able, you and your team are able to give your customers the service that they deserve. In this week’s episode of Real Retail TV, we’re going to explore ways that you can increase your sales, optimize your sales in these last few weeks. There are a couple of tried and true tricks that are easy to execute. So I hope that you find this helpful.

So let’s get into it. How can you increase your sales the last few weeks of the holidays? Many of you are probably doing some of these things already, but I’d like you to think about them and perhaps modify, expand, accelerate those. And if you’re not doing them, put them into action to put more money in the bank.

The first thing that I want to suggest is to expand your hours. Last year, it was the week before Christmas, I came downtown Grand Haven here on a Sunday and fully half the stores were closed. The sidewalk was filled with people and half of the stores were closed. Now, if you’re closed because of religious reasons, truly religious reasons, certainly I understand that.

But most people close on Sundays because they’re always closed on Sunday. And why would they change during the holidays in any way they’re already tired on the holidays so they don’t open? I can tell you that the stores that were opened last year were the stores that have been around for decades. The experienced merchants, the veteran merchants, the better merchants, including my brother Steve and sister-in-law Lynn at the Mackinac Kite Company.

So by expanding your hours, if you’re not open on Sundays, by all means, be open on these last few Sundays. If you’re not open later, if you’re only open till six right now, expand your hours till eight. You will find that a lot of people are doing last minute shopping and those hours are going to make you money. Now, here’s an interesting idea that came to us from Jennifer Shorter from grandpa Shorter’s gifts in Petoskey, Michigan.

And Jennifer is a member of the Platinum Mastermind group. And so because she’s a member and we keep a cone of silence, we keep a confidentiality about us, I asked her if it was okay if I shared this and she generously said yes. But Jennifer has started opening one morning a week, Tuesdays from six to nine in the morning for third shift workers. Her daughter is a new Emmett County sheriff and she’s working the overnight shift and she’s not able to find the time to shop.

So that prompted Jennifer to open one day a week just for those people. Now, how could Jennifer accelerate this? Jennifer can accelerate the success of this expansion by finding out what factories in Petoskey, Michigan have third shift workers.

Can she, she can talk to the chamber of commerce that get in touch. What she said was that she has gotten a tremendous feedback on social media that the buzz associated with it has been really, really positive and significant.

The other thing that we suggested was that she should write a press release about that because she’s doing something different. And if she puts her daughter into the story, all of a sudden they have a made for the news story. This is another example of adding hours to add sales. I think it’s absolutely brilliant.

And if you have a town with a lot of third shift workers, it’s a no brainer. And even if you don’t, it is one of those things that it’s newsworthy. It opens things up. You can’t sell through a closed door.

This is a wonderful example of expanding your hours.

The second thing is to keep leading. Last week, we talked about keeping your energy up, but the name of the game right now is for you as an owner or a manager to be on the floor. Now’s not the time for you to be in the back room. Yes, there are some things you must do, but really now is the time for you to be on the floor.

Keep your team positive, keep your team focused. Keep them really, really focused on your customers. You see, your team focuses on what you focus on. And when you come into your store positive, engaged, excited, your team is going to be positive, engaged and excited.

And that positivity, that engagement and that excitement is going to make its way to your customers, which is going to lead to more and better sales. You know, you need to exhibit the selling behaviors that are important. Things like adding on, Harry Friedman, the retail sales trainer has a great quote that I learned years and years ago and used to great success, show, show, show until they say no. Down the stretch, people are trying to get their shopping done And when you keep showing, they keep buying.

Three words that are incredibly powerful on the sales floor this time of year. Who else is, it’s more than three words, never mind. Who else is on your list? So somebody comes into your store to buy a thing for a person and you walk them through that process, they’re happy with what’s happening, you know, they’re happy with that part of the transaction, then just say, who else is on your list?

You would be amazed at how many people would say, well, now that I think about it, and all of a sudden you have another part of that sale. You’ve increased that sale significantly. You need to add on impulse items at the counter with every single customer. If you’re not doing it, your team’s not gonna do it.

You need to ask everyone to join your loyalty program. Those names getting people into your program is how you take that casual holiday shopper and turn them into a year round shopper. So all of these behaviors you need to exhibit down the stretch because if you let them slide, your team’s gonna let them slide and you’re gonna lose money and opportunity because of it.

And the third thing that I’d like to explore here is this idea of more activity. Activity, activity, activity. The more things you do to drive traffic, the more traffic that you’re gonna drive. And the more traffic you drive, the more sales you’re going to make.

So one of the things that I would encourage you to do is to get together with your leadership team or with everybody on your team for that matter or anybody who is interested in marketing and ADD this. ADD is an acronym, a framework that I created and it stands for ask, discuss, decide. And the ask is what kind of thing can we do that will bring people in the store? What kind of down and dirty, easy to execute promotions can you put on your calendar between now and the end of the year?

You know somebody who’s a Santa Claus, bring them in for pictures with Santa. You know, if you have family or friends who are in the high school choir, bring them in, you know, serve food and let people know about it. But activity, activity, activity.

When you generate more activity, you get more opportunities to talk to your customers, right? You want to create the opportunities to post things on social media, just talk about in your email. So this whole idea of down and dirty, let’s just get things going on these last couple weeks is a powerful, powerful concept. And getting your team involved with thinking about it makes it easier, makes it better. You’ll be amazed at the great ideas you’ll get from your team.

And finally, social media live. This is a this is such a great time. Everybody’s always scrolling social media and now is the time to plant those ideas in your customers and in those viewers brains. So you can do unboxing videos live.

One of my favorite things that I like to suggest is if you’re talking to a customer and they’re enthusiastic about something in your store, ask them, would you mind going live and talking about that thing? You pull out your phone, you put in all the settings, and you just basically, you interview them. You know, say, I’m here. I am here with Freddie and Freddie loves, loves, loves these blue widgets.

Freddie, tell us about these blue widgets and Freddie’s gonna go blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And this is what we call user generated content, customer generated content. You can give your team members permission to go live whenever they’re inspired. But the more you go live, the more you’re gonna show up in people’s feed.

The more you show up in people’s feeds, the more they’re thinking about you down the stretch. Remember, people are shopping at the last minute. Even people who have done all their shopping, they’re looking for that little extra bit of joy, and it’s your job to show them that that little bit of extra joy is in your store. Come on in.

You’re gonna get the kind of Christmas or holiday experience that you want, the kind of holiday experience that’s going to warm your heart.

But if you don’t show them, if you don’t tell them about it, they’re not gonna know about it. They’re gonna forget about you. So your job is to stay in front of them. So there it is, three ways that if you apply them can bring a lot more sales back into your store in these final weeks of the holidays.

So the final thing that I want to talk about is on January speaking of marketing, on January thirteen, Susan and I are going live with Power Promotions. It’s a full day workshop where you will be building out your twenty twenty six promotional calendar. I’m gonna share probably around seventy five tried, true, proven promotions that you can pick and choose to put onto your calendar. We’re gonna talk about how you leverage what you’re already doing and the fun thing that we’re doing this year that we’re really excited about.

We’re gonna be going to show you, share with you the exact AI prompts that you can use to make your promotions even better. This is going to save you enormous amounts of time. It’s also going to make your promotions a lot better. So it’s all really, really, really exciting.

And as always, when you buy anything, when you invest in anything from Whizbang Retail Training, you get an unconditional money back guarantee. So you spend the day with me and Susan, and you’re not convinced that that you’re going to make ten, twenty, a hundred times your investment back. If you’re not satisfied for any reason, give us a call, we’ll give you your money back. You take absolutely no risk.

So that is that. I hope that you found these tips to help you build your holiday sales helpful. I’m Bob Negen and we’re gonna see you again next week.