How Brands Can Turn Sales Associates Into Brand Advocates

Brands need to build a connection between themselves and sales associates if they wish to increase brand advocacy and in turn drive sales and offer a great customer experience. Building brand advocacy, when it pertains to retail sales associates, is about creating a connection and nurturing that connection into a relationship - one where the sales associates speak positively about your brand to consumers.

When a brand builds a meaningful connection with retail sales associates it can lead to increased sales (higher sell-through), a positive customer experience, and an increase in brand loyalty.

A failure to build a connection however leads to the opposite - lower sell-through negative customer experiences and, in the worst case, associates becoming brand detractors.

By recognizing associates’ efforts, listening to and implementing feedback, as well as creating engaging learning resources brands can build advocacy amongst retail sales associates and grow their business.

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Recognition for Engagement

Sales associates working in a store that sells products made by multiple brands also have access to product training content from multiple brands. Recognizing and rewarding sales staff for engaging with your brand’s content creates a positive feeling amongst sales staff, a feeling that is likely to be reciprocated when talking to customers about your brand's product.

A digital retail sales enablement platform that incorporates features such as prizes, leaderboards and badges helps to create brand advocacy as associates are rewarded for their engagement with the brand’s product training content and can see where they rank amongst their colleagues. This helps to bring out the natural competitive nature of people and pushes associates to engage further with the brand’s content.

This gamification of learning content and reward structure creates a cycle where both the associate and brand benefit. Associates learn more as their competitive nature drives them to complete more content and brands see higher engagement numbers as associates consume more of their content and ultimately become brand advocates.

Collecting and Implementing Feedback

By using a sales enablement tool to collect feedback, both qualitative and quantitative, brands can add to the connection that is being built between sales associate and brand. Similarly to recognizing the efforts of sales associates that engage in a brand’s product training content, brands can also position themselves in a positive light to sales associates by collecting and implementing their feedback.

Collecting feedback from associates and more importantly implementing that feedback lets associates know that their voice is being heard and that the brand cares about their opinion and experience. This feedback helps brands deliver the training content and collateral that retail sellers need to get the job done.

In turn, sales associates are more likely to speak positively about a brand to customers if their relationship with the brand behind the scenes is a positive one. Nurturing this relationship helps brands to produce better content for associates and helps associates to become more knowledgeable on the brand.

Creating Engaging Learning Resources

The third way brands can build brand advocacy is through creating engaging training content. Retail sales associates, either consciously or subconsciously, are more likely to appreciate and complete learning content that they find interesting.

Creating engaging, short-form video content is the primary way to educate associates on your brand’s products. These, coupled with additional material such as eye-catching one-pagers, flip cards and quizzes all help to make learning from your brand a fun experience.

In contrast, a brand whose product training content is dull, uninformative and lengthy is likely to turn associates into brand detractors who project this same dullness onto consumers.

By building a connection with associates through engaging content sales staff are more likely to recommend your brand’s products to customers and even point them in the direction of your product when customers are looking at another brand.

Conclusion

Brands that use a digital retail sales enablement platform such as Myagi have the ability to create brand advocates on a regional and even global scale. Additionally, brands can create these advocates with minimal effort and cost compared to those that don’t and rely on sending out brand reps which require travel and accommodation expenses.

Recognizing and rewarding associates for engaging with your content, collecting and implementing feedback and creating engaging learning resources help create a bridge between sales associate and brand in which both parties benefit.

Myagi’s platform not only allows brands to post content and additional learning resources to make learning for sales associates easier and more enjoyable but also features real-time analytics that brand admins can view so they can gauge how well their content is being received, how knowledgable retail sellers are and how they feel about their brand.

To find out more about how Myagi or Myagi Services can help increase your brand advocacy get in touch or click the button below to chat with us.

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