In addition to using your salon data to develop targeted promotions and identify your most lucrative equipment and sales, you can also make an instant impact on the bottom line by improving your staff’s sales skills and success. Easier said than done, right? But you know from experience how much better some of your employees are at selling and how much of a difference there can be between the top and bottom performers. You’ll still have to identify the right ways to train and motivate them to succeed, but the first step is to understand if there’s something wrong with your overall approach so you can make pricing or purchasing option changes and communicate with your entire staff about strategic adjustments.

“Looking at just a sliver of data through occasional reports leads to an incomplete understanding of your business’s complete sales strategy and results in poor decision making. You cannot monitor a handful of numbers occasionally and expect to see lasting results. You must also see the numbers in the context of previous numbers for a proper comparison and trend,” says Tan-Link Account Manager Jon Toston.

“We recommend that every metric you view, you look at This Month To Date, This Month Last Year To Date, This Month Last Year, This Year To Date, Last Year To Date, and 1-Year rolling period.”

Toston and Tan-Link recommend keeping a close eye on the following metrics to gauge your staff’s overall performance:

• EFT Revenue
• EFT Distribution Over Packages
• EFT As A % Of Revenue
• EFT Missed Opportunities
• Online Sales
• Membership Sales
• EFTs Sell/Cancel Ratio
• New Client Counts and Revenue from New Clients Only
• Unique Tanner Count
• 1-Year Customer Average.
• *Other metrics may need to be viewed to diagnose problem sales areas.

Also consider each employee individually. You surely have a good idea who’s performing well and who’s not but take a closer look to try to identify how you can help the stragglers. Coaching each staff members individually to improve their problem areas should be more effective than just conveying general sales techniques alone.

“One of the most commonly used analytics is the Lotions Per Person Average (PPA or LPPA) report. Essentially it will show you how your employees are performing from a sales standpoint that is fair. An employee who works 40 hours per week may sell more than an employee who works just 10 hours per week. But that doesn’t make them the better salesperson. This report will show you how much the employee sells per opportunity. This is a much more accurate way to determine the quality and effort an employee is providing,” says Jeff Oakes, President of Nichesoft, the developer of TanTrack software.

If your employees aren’t steadily improving over time, something needs to change, and the same goes for your business as a whole. If you’re struggling to find new ideas to keep getting better, start digging into the data and you might be surprised what you can learn and accomplish!