The strategy is to mystery shop your business… This is something you often find the ‘big boys’ doing, because it works!

I would recommend that you pay someone to do it and not do it yourself because of your attachment to the way you do things. So, get an outside company or a coach (yes, I do this for my clients).

What they or we do is become a customer of your business and do a customer walk through your business be that online, email, walking into your shop, by telephone whatever way a customer does business with you.

You then get the chance to look at your business after the fact.

If you were to think about your favourite sports person or team when they perform or even sometimes when they train, they will study the stats look at their performance on video. They will watch it again and again to see how they did things and then consider how they could do things differently next time. In the case of a team they would look at how they performed as a team as a whole and individually within that team.

This is a really great strategy and I’ll give you a quick example of how this worked in a company selling computers I was coaching some years ago.

After speaking to the owner about great sales habits I asked him to reflect on how he thought he and his team performed against these habits, in his opinion they were great allstar performers and he was confident enough to put it to the test.

So, we got someone to go into the shop with a voice recorder hidden on their person (very cloak and dagger) they set about purchasing a laptop from one of the sales staff.

At our next session we listened to the call and scored it against criteria like the amount of times the salesperson said umm and err, how many times they mentioned the product and not the needs of the person. It became clear they were selling the product not providing the best solution for the customer…

Then we marked the number of questions versus statements. He rarely asked questions of our mystery shopper about what looking for or how they intended to use it, what was their level of skill on computers etc. Instead he bamboozled them with features, which of course displayed how knowledgeable he was but it did not serve the customer.

He had double digit scores in some of the less than useful sales habits.

When the owner had listened to the recording, he sat across the table looking as though someone had just slapped him. The big reveal here is, that he was the sales person who had interacted with the mystery shopper.

The challenge for all of us is we can’t see our own bald spot and we go about our day mostly unconscious to the bad habits that we have let set in.

Tiger Woods once said I can’t see my own swing and that is why he had a coaches someone from the outside holding the mirror up to what he couldn’t see.

Now in this particular business we put together a training plan and were able to make the improvements necessary, following the mystery shop and after the removal of the bad habits we saw a 56%rise in sales inside six months…

It takes courage to have someone hold the mirror up to your processes but this is such a cool game changing strategy.

If using the services of a mystery shopper is something you would like to consider gives me a shout…