Your products are finally available in retail stores: congratulations! But what happens next? Between drawing up marketing plans and managing the operational logistics of breaking into retail, many brands forget one critical piece: retail sales training. This essential educational initiative ensures that beauty advisors working in retail stores know your brand exists and understand how to sell your products to customers. It’s long been considered one of the most effective ways to boost sell-through. The only problem? It’s expensive. Large brands spend upwards of 10% of their retail sales on training alone–hiring huge nationwide sales teams, devoting hundreds of thousands of dollars to gratis programs, and forking over big budgets to content execution. Even smaller brands spend big money: training consultancies can charge upwards of $30,000 monthly to visit stores on your behalf. So what’s a newer brand to do?
The answer is BeautyFluent: our new digital education app that makes sales training easier and more affordable than ever before. Designed to solve many of the outdated training programs that prevent newer brands from reaching beauty advisors, BeautyFluent makes it possible for brands to connect with retail sales associates, educate them on their products, and reward them for their influence on the sales floor. Here are just a few of the ways that BeautyFluent makes training easier than ever before.
Create & Upload Sales Training Content In Seconds
While training sheets are an affordable way to educate BAs, they can take a lot of time to create. BeautyFluent cuts this time in half by importing your product information into pre-designed templates. All you have to do is fill out a few extra fields and hit publish and you have comprehensive training sheets that BAs can access instantly on their phones.
Help BAs Train Wherever, Whenever
By simply scanning a product barcode on their phones, BAs can instantly pull up training information including product videos, demo tips and more. This makes it easy for BAs to learn about your brand and gain key product knowledge training on the fly. Plus, they can discover your retail training content even when they aren’t at work: browsing training sheets, watching videos and taking fun quizzes on their own time.
Make Training More Rewarding & Improve Retention
With hundreds of brands to remember in just one store, beauty advisors have an impossible task. So how can you ensure that your brand stands out from the rest? The key is rewarding beauty advisors for their attention and retention. By incentivizing BAs to complete fun quizzes to earn points that they can cash in for rewards and perks, BeautyFluent keeps BAs engaged with your brand and ensures that they actually remember what they learned in training. Retail sales professionals with the right skills, product training and customer experience harness the power to impact your brands sales growth on the shop floor.
Target Gratis Programs to the Right Retail Employees
A majority of beauty advisors agree that it’s important for them to personally try products themselves in order to recommend them to customers. When brands can’t visit stores in person, many choose to send boxes full of free products for beauty advisors to try. But in a chaotic store environment, these products often never make it into the hands of the BAs who are most engaged with your brand. BeautyFluent solves this problem by allowing BAs to cash in points for your product–showing that they are engaged and interested in trying your product. Plus, BeautyFluent lets you ship the gratis directly to the BA at home, so there’s no doubt that it’s getting into the right hands. Store associates with the best training experience have the potential to build confidence with customers and increase sales.
Track the Success of Your Retail Sales Training Program
Unlike more analog training systems, BeautyFluent makes it possible for you to track the results of your training program at the store level. Our data and reporting systems makes it easy to see which stores are most engaged with your brand on our app and how that effects sales. You can even see if sending gratis to retail staff resulted in a meaningful sales lift at the stores where they work.
BeautyFluent is available to brands at a fraction of the cost of other sales training programs. For one flat annual fee, get unlimited access to a community of beauty advisors that work in their retail channels across the country. To learn more about BeautyFluent and apply to be a brand partner, get in touch with our team.