Trends

The AllWork Guide to Restarting Your Field Team

The past few weeks have been an unprecedented time for brands and retailers. Now that stores are reopening and customers are shopping again, it’s time to put sales talent back into stores to drive engagement and increase sales. However, things are different from where you last left them and it requires a new approach to managing your talent that you may not be used to.

That’s why we’ve created a guide for restarting this remote, in-store field team. We’ve laid out some of the best practices that we’ve seen working with over 50 beauty brands and the steps you can take to help ensure success reentering the retail scene.

Here are the top 5 things you need to do to make sure you get off on the right foot restarting your team:

Reeducate Your Team (and Yourself)

The retail environment will be quite different from how you left it. There may be new health and safety laws in place now, especially for the beauty industry. Make sure you and your team are up-to-date on any precautions or restrictions still in place. Of course, these will be updated frequently so it is important to check-in with your local and state restrictions often. This will hopefully allow for a seamless transition back into retail for your team.

Train Your Team on Products & Policies

Make sure your team has been trained on new products or even new ways of applying your products. Some examples of new techniques you may need to implement when restarting your team at retail include:

• Encourage customers to bring in their own applicators.
• Educate everyone on how to sanitize their brushes.
• Have your team teach clients to do their own makeup or skincare routine rather than applying it for them.

Update Your Budget

Before you begin scheduling talent back into stores, you’re going to need to reevaluate your budget. Your budget may be completely different now and you’ll need to determine which stores you will be staffing and how many team members you can rehire. Next, create a realistic sales per hour number to determine an ROI that you can begin to measure.

Collect Data From the Sales Floor

There will be no room for error in this new retail environment. It’s more important than ever that you have full insight into the performance of your team. Make sure you’re collecting these important key metrics in real-time:

• Sales per hour
• Notes from the sales floor
• Photos of displays and events
• To-the-minute start and end times of shifts

Pay Your Team Properly!

Recent events have made having an expert payroll partner even more important. Employment, and unemployment, laws are continuously changing so it’s important to have an experienced payroll team in place. Having a payroll partner means seamless payments for your entire team to make sure you’re compliant with all state, local, & federal laws including the new AB 5 Bill in California.

So, how do you do all of this?

Transitioning your field team back into retail will be tricky at first, but tapping into a workforce management platform can help set your team up success by making sure you have all of the tools you need to manage your remote team.

AllWork has a full end-to-end system including budgeting, scheduling, time & attendance with a mobile app, a learning management portal, and payroll services. We also have a talent pool of 60,000 beauty professionals that you can use to restart your hiring efforts.

Our platform allows you to restart your retail team while minimizing travel and give you everything you need to manage them from a distance. Altogether, we can help you increase sales and productivity while improving the ROI of your talent spend.