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making profit on the replacement cartridges.”
Smokers Choice offers a full range of vaping products,
including a line of its own Choice vape devices. It also plans to
introduce its own brand of e-juice by year-end.
enGaGinG empLoyees tHrouGH inCentives
Next on Smokers Choice’s agenda is a revamped employee
training and incentive program. Most tobacco retail chains
struggle with employee retention and Smokers Choice is no
exception. After all, workers who are paid minimum wage tend
not to be the most ambitious employees. In fact, they often
aren’t all that motivated to show up for work, let alone go the
extra mile. At a time when innovations in categories like vapor
products are coming fast and furious and consumers need more
guidance than ever, employees who lack motivation and can’t
demonstrate product knowledge are particularly problematic.
“Turnover was high, and every time we got a new person we
had to have two people on shifts until the new employee [was]
trained,” Schwartz comments. “It was very expensive.”
Tackling the issue head-on could help on two fronts: employee
retention and incremental sales. Once again, Schwartz decided
to look to the retail landscape for solutions, search out stores
that excel at motivating and retaining workers, and look for
ways to emulate best practices.The company used that research
to develop a training process focusing on three imperatives:
business processes, product knowledge and sales skills.
The program is still under development, but Schwartz
envisions a more sophisticated sales training program that
incorporates role-playing and rewards employees for achieving
sales goals.
“If a sales clerk asks every customer who comes in, ‘Do
you want a lottery ticket?’ or ‘How about a lighter with that?’
you can add to the bottom line,” he says. “We’re putting
suggestions like that right into the FasTrax POS system so
it will prompt them to be more proactive. Ultimately, we’re
looking to develop partnerships with our employees, so that
they make minimum wage but have the potential to earn
significantly more money through incentives.”
TBi
trench marketing
