Creating an Effective Retail and E-commerce Selling Technique

When creating a selling technique for your business, building a memorable system that your employees will rally around is essential. An effective selling technique isn’t just about the salespeople closing a deal—it should be something the entire company can use to keep its priorities straight. There’s much to learn from how other businesses have approached this issue.

The Macy’s M.A.G.I.C. Selling Strategy

When I was overseeing the Babies “R” Us retail chain, we needed to develop an easy-to-remember retail selling technique that would help our sales floor associates repetitively create sales and delight guests. We developed several ideas, but then we learned that Macy’s uses a mnemonic device to ensure consistency in its sales strategy: M.A.G.I.C.

The Macy’s M.A.G.I.C. sales acronym stands for: 

• Meet and make a connection
• Ask questions and listen
• Give options and give advice
• Inspire to buy and sell more
• Celebrate the purchase

It was easy to remember, fit our salespeople perfectly, and it worked. The acronym is simple, but its ideas are essential to Macy’s overall approach to business—it’s all about connecting with its customers. Therefore, I believe that companies should take a leaf from Macy’s book when creating a selling technique. 

Creating an E-Commerce Selling Strategy

The beauty of an acronym-based sales strategy is that it’s easy to remember and repeat. It’s catchy enough to put on posters in the breakroom or company documents to ensure it’s at the forefront of your employees’ minds. 

If your people can remember the sales strategy and make it a part of your company culture, you’re well on your way to having an effective selling technique. To help you with some options, here are a few other useful acronym-based sales systems to consider: 

• A.R.C.: Ask, Recommend, Close/Cross-Sell
• F.A.B.: Features, Attributes, Benefits
• LAIR: Listen, Acknowledge, Identify objection, Reverse it
• SELL: Show, Explain, Lead to benefits, and Let them talk

These are generic, but they’re an excellent place to start. Ideally, your acronym will fit your business (you can see how “The Magic of Macy’s” was catchy enough to become a company-wide slogan, so the acronym made perfect sense). 

Acronyms make your sales strategy easy to remember, resulting in a more consistent sales process and a smoother training period for new salespeople. As with the examples above, they can be simple or slightly more complex, as in Macy’s example. In addition, the acronym can break down more significant concepts into bite-sized pieces for your employees to digest.

Of course, a clever mnemonic device alone isn’t enough. There must be real meaning behind it, something your salespeople can use as a reference, and the rest of your company can cite when thinking about the overall mission. After all, the way you approach sales says a lot about your business.

Creating an effective selling technique doesn’t always happen overnight. Some inspiration can help. Click here to sign up and have my free weekly blog articles about collaborative business opportunities delivered to your inbox. 

Coach Dave