Top 10 Fashion reps tips

When you have to wear a mask, it can deaden your facial expression because so much of your face is covered. It is more important than ever to overcompensate for that by smiling with your eyes - smize. It takes practice to lift the corners of your mouth until wrinkles appear by your eyes but it is the best way to make a good impression when a shopper first encounters you.

Before you clock in or step on the sales floor, stop yourself and do an expectation check. What are you concentrating on? Will customers be hostile, mean, penny-pinching lookie-lous or will it be a fun day helping people buy from you? One of the old sales pros used to say, "Garbage in, garbage out" so take care what you listen to or watch before coming to work as it might trap you into a negative world-view.

Yes, you can wear sneakers but no, you probably shouldn't. A sign at Piperlime's pop-up store in SOHO said it all: "It's time to give up lazy dressing altogether because it's time to look fabulous again. Let's show each other and ourselves a little more respect. Let's put Saturday night effort into Sunday afternoon. Let's remember you get what you dress for so let's get dressed." Excellent points as we all struggle with Zoom calls and social distancing!

It is a fact that we love to talk about people. From the craziest internet stories to celebrity falls from grace, gossip is more popular than ever. The danger is that it comes from a place where we feel better about ourselves at someone else's expense. That's the opposite of selling. You should feel better about someone as a result of them coming in your shop.

Effective Sales Techniques require liking people before they like you. I know, this is hard but you can't judge a book by its cover or a customer by their clothes. When we do that to try to decide who is worth our efforts, we're oftentimes wrong and settle for crumbs when we can have the whole banquet.

Knights of the round table used to kneel as an act of servitude to their master or royalty. It was an outward sign of servitude toward another. Don't confuse this with slavery. The act of serving another goes back to biblical times and is mentioned throughout literature as one of the greatest gifts to humanity. In retail right now, we often have sales staff acting as king or queen, as if they are doing the customer the favor. This is wrong.

Keep count one day of every customer you encounter and every customer you ring up. Divide the two to find your ratio of sales to visits.  This gives you the number of sales you close compared to the number of presentations you make of merchandise. At first, this might be one out of every 10. With practice, you'll find by being aware of all the customers you had to sell, you've made more sales.

Find the ugliest one of your company's products you can. This shouldn't be hard. Determine to find five things about it you love using the feature "it has" to link to the benefit for the customer "so you." What you'll find is that once you give up your assumptions and personal bias, you can find several things and use suggestive selling to make a compelling case why a customer should buy an item.

Sure it's 30% off and has free financing for 20 years. But something like that will sell itself - you're not stretching yourself. Increasing your product knowledge and retail sales training techniques will also increase sales.