“May I Help You?”

By Keith Bagley

Recently, onboard a plane on a business trip, I sat beside a regional manager for a major apparel retailer. During our conversation, she discussed some of the things they were doing to improve their sales. I found it particularly interesting that one of the initiatives was to completely remove “May I help you?” from the vocabulary of the selling floor staff.
While I understand that the intention of this action was to have the sales associates replace this highly over used phrase with something less likely to generate a negative response from a shopper, often the impact of a strategy like this can have a negative impact on the selling floor.

Often, selling floor staff, afraid of saying “May I help you?” and worse yet, afraid of being caught saying this to a “Secret Shopper”, will avoid customers altogether. If retailers are going to take away a natural and comfortable phrase from their staff, they need to do the work, including training and role playing to help the sales associates become comfortable with new “opening lines”.

I find it particularly interesting, looking at what is really going on in apparel retail these days, that a strategy such as this could gain so much focus. It is clearly a case of not understanding what is happening on the selling floor. Fact is, very few mall based apparel retailers sell to more that 20% of their traffic 35% if they are in a destination location. Somewhere between 65% - 80% of their traffic are NOT buying.

Stop for a minute and draw upon your own experience. When was the last time you were actually SOLD something in a retail store? When was the last time a sales associate really did a good job determining your needs? When was the last time you were promptly approached and acknowledged?

In many cases, you have been ignored in retail stores more often that you care to think about. In many cases, you probably had at least an idea of the article you wanted to buy, but could not find it. The work we have done over the last 15 years indicates clearly that NOT opening sales is one of the greatest killers of closing ratio.
Rather than put in place initiatives that hinder sales associates’ abilities to open more sales, retailers need to find new and creative ways of opening more sales. Opening more sales opportunities will usually enable you to close more sales. The problem is generally not what people are saying, but instead, what they are NOT saying.

“May I help you?” is obviously not the best opening line, from a theoretical viewpoint, but it will beat saying nothing, or not approaching shoppers every time. One thing “May I help you?” will do is weed out the tire kickers quickly, and while you will miss some, you will have at least made contact with the shopper, letting them know that there is someone there that could assist them when they are ready. Approaching shoppers and acknowledging them can help act as a deterrent to shoplifters, as they will know that the selling floor staff are aware of their presence.

I am certainly not condoning this phrase as the best one in retail, but the fact is, many retailers have very little in the way of resources dedicated to training staff. Enabling the staff to approach everyone that comes into your store is a more productive way to increase your sales and closing ratio.

Consider again, if you are an apparel retailer, that you close 20% – 35% of your traffic, (in some cases, the closing ratios may be considerably lower). If you could close, at best 3 more of every 65 people that leave your store empty handed, you will have a 10% increase in sales. The key is finding them, and this is not going to be best done with cute opening lines, until you can ensure you have at least offered to serve everyone in your store.

Keith Bagley has been involved with the use of traffic counting data to help retailers increase store sales since 1983. As a former retailer, he was "sold" on the concept of using traffic data to aid in the sales management after achieving substantial increases in sales in the retail stores he worked in. As a successful consultant, he has worked with hundreds of stores, helping them manage more effectively, and drive their sales using traffic data. Keith can be reached at keith.bagley@shaw.ca or at (250) 861-9339.