Being the best Retail Sales Assistant requires a combination of customer service skills, product knowledge, and a positive attitude. Here are some top tips to excel in this role:
- Helpful
When it comes to top tips to be the best sales assistant, helpfulness will always appear on top of the list. Sales Assistants always needs to be eager, willing, and open to be helpful to customers.
- People’s Person
Being a People’s Person is a key retail skill, especially in sales. A sales assistant should always be friendly, naturally welcoming, approachable and easy to communicate with. Customers will feel most comfortable with a retail sales assistant that is a people’s person.
- Influential
It shouldn’t surprise anyone that being an influential person is one of those strong retail sales skills that your associates need to have. This is where your persuasive skills come into play.
Being persuasive comes down to being able to correctly understand a customer’s needs, overcome objections and explain why a product is right for the customer. This is also why product knowledge is a key skill (point 4 below) to being a great sales assistant.
- Product knowledge
A Retail Sales Assistant must have the product knowledge to be able to make strong product recommendations based on a customer’s needs and price points. They should be familiar with the pros, cons and uses of a different item, and know what you have in store.
- Patient
An impatient salesperson is not going to be successful. Sales assistants need to listen to the same questions and explain the same care instructions, product warranties, and company guarantees dozens of times a day.
Sales Assistants will also need to deal with rude and temperamental clients, potential issues with products, and customers who spend an extraordinary amount of time trying to decide what they want.
- Multitasking
Sales can be a chaotic job role. Your sales associate needs to be able to listen to the customers needs, make small talk with them while thinking about products that would be a good fit, find the products on the shelves, watch for new customers coming in and know when to push for the close.
- Adaptable
As a sales associate, you’ll have a lot thrown at you. You might have crafted the perfect sales pitch for the standard client, only to have someone come in who breaks the mold. They have different objections or different needs, and you need to adapt.
- Trend aware
From furniture to shoes to snacks, tech, workout gear and beyond, everything goes through trends. Sales assistants need to know what’s hot right now—what are the new products you have on the shelves? What’s selling better than anything else? What resonates with Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X and Boomers?
By combining these skills and attitudes, you can provide exceptional service, build customer loyalty, and contribute to a successful retail team.
