If you want to have a successful holiday season, your business depends on having a dynamite sales team… which means that hiring for the holidays and training them effectively is one of the most important things you can do!

How to Find the Best People:

There are specific  staffing agencies and HR resources out there that specialize in placing hungry sales people in specialty retail. Especially if you’re looking to hire Israeli sales associates for your kiosk, this is going to be a goldmine for you. Here are some additional ways to spread the word that you’re hiring for the holidays:

• Post the opening on your business and personal social media accounts, which should include Facebook, Twitter and Instagram
• Ask friends, family and professional networks for referrals
• Post to Craigslist

How to Identify the Best People:

When it comes to sales, the best people are often not the ones with the most experience, but the ones that are most willing to learn. Finding candidates with certain personality traits will help you identify top-producing sales associates. People with at least a few of these characteristics will thrive in specialty retail this holiday season:

• Ability to follow a process
• Thrive on competition
• Confident
• Motivated by money
• Hard working
• Positive attitude

How to Train for Stellar Performance:

Setting your team up for success is ultimately setting yourself up for success. Training your team on opening/closing processes, using the point of sale and other operational behaviors are important, but the real value is in giving them the tools to be stellar sales people.

Here are some tips on rethinking how you train your staff:

• Listen More Than You Talk: Doing the inverse will portray you as some one who “knows-it-all” and someone who isn’t open to suggestions , ideas and new ways of doing things.
• Understand Their Motivation: People are encouraged to do better at their job for all sorts of reasons, so it’s fair to say that if you treat everyone the same, you’ll get less than ideal results.
• Help Them Learn: People make mistakes. Rather than “losing it” or blaming them, consider helping them reflect on their actions, what went wrong and what could be done differently the next time around for improved results.

How to Keep Them Motivated:

Sales people like to compete. They like to be challenged. They like to be rewarded. It’s important to remember this while you’re hiring for the holidays, and here are a few ways to nurture your sales team:

• Set challenging goals: and then believe that they can achieve them. If you believe it, then they will too.
• Create a competition among your staff: Nova has built-in features to help you do this, and provides ways for your team to engage with the competition. 
• Reward your top sellers: Keep your sales team engaged and excited by creating daily or weekly “spiffs”. These can include reaching a certain sales number, pushing a particular product or any other business result that’s important to you.

Getting the right sales team in place for the holiday season isn’t an easy task. It takes lots of hard work, dedication and patience. Hopefully, with these tips and ideas you will have the best team ever this year!