The Retail Essentials program provides lesson content designed for owners and managers, and retail staff. Owner/manager content may be provided to staff at the discretion of the client, based on the levels of leadership within your organization. The content is scalable on portable devices using the zoom feature of your device.
An app is available for offline viewing of content for iPad or Android portable devices.
About blended learning
Many people are still skeptical about the benefits of online learning. It is the rare person who can pick up a book or take a class or visit a web page and suddenly be proficient in something the next day. For the rest of us, we need to discover new knowledge, and practice its application to develop skills and proficiency. Professional educators have long known that individualized learning is the fastest and most successful route to such an outcome. Online learning plays a part in providing convenient access to content, and the learner can view what they want as much as they need to without affecting a class or group of people around them. But it is not a substitute for social interaction, positive human feedback, or experience. That is why it is necessary to combine online learning with face-to-face and experiential learning in a blended learning approach.
Blended learning is a learning format in which the learner receives training and knowledge at least in part through online delivery of content and instruction, with the learner having some element of control over time, place, path and pacing. Blended learning is our recommended approach to the use of Retail Essentials. It means combining the course materials found here with face-to-face training and experiential learning. It is the most productive form of learning available today, both academically and financially.
Before beginning this course, please view our interactive tutorial about blended learning.
Courseware designed for staff
- Unit 1 – Sales and Service
Lessons in this unit include: Professional service (representing yourself and the business); awareness, approach and greeting; qualifying customer value and customer need; understanding the buying imperative (today versus future needs); offering a benefit; associated sales (related products, warranty, financing); and tiered customers, quoting and post-sale follow-ups.
- Unit 2 – Managing the Customer Experience
Lessons in this unit include: Merchandising the store; store layout and traffic plans; having the right customer service policy; and how to mystery shop your own store(s).
- Unit 3 – Marketing Mix (the 4 P’s)
Lessons in this unit include: Place (customer convenience and distribution models); Product (what the customer wants and what you want); Price (elasticity and the marketing strategy; and Promotion (telling the right story to the right people).
Courseware designed for owners & managers (can be shared with staff)
- Unit 4 – Financial Management
Lessons in this unit include: The business plan; break even calculations; category & product cost benefit analysis; and scenarios and solutions.
- Unit 5 – Sales Statistics
Lessons in this unit include: Sales per hour; sales per square foot; key performance indicators; comparable store growth; building the sales report; and customer capture rate.
- Unit 6 – Inventory Control
Lessons in this unit include: Supply chain efficiency (drop ship, ordering system integration); inventory turnover ratio; return rate by product/person/client; and reducing shrinkage.
- Unit 7 – Online Retailing
Lessons in this unit include: Email marketing do’s and don’ts; ecommerce in support of bricks and mortar (sell or be seen or both?); online ordering for drop ship (pitfalls and precautions); and cost benefit analysis scenarios.