Today, I’m sharing my top 3 leadership must-do’s when team sales are down.

Why? Because, as a former spa business owner myself, I know that there’s one guaranteed way to strike fear into the heart of any spa owner– to tell them sales are way down and to watch them spin in circles trying to manage the problem!

Any seasoned spa industry pro will know that it’s expected that appointment bookings and retail sales will be dependent on seasonality… but what happens when there’s an unusual lag in appointments and retail sales?

As an owner and/or manager, you are first and foremost responsible for your team’s sales (or lack thereof). Here are 3 leadership tips that can help you turn even the driest months into high-revenue ones!

#1: Improve Your Spa Team’s Product Knowledge Support 

Okay, let’s have a virtual show of hands here: do you feel confident in the idea that every single individual team member is completely proficient when it comes to product knowledge?

Follow up questions include:

• Did each individual team member train with a designated rep, or were they left to review a manual about it?
• Was each individual team member provided in-depth yearly product knowledge training, or was it up to them to keep themselves up-to-date about new products?
• As a spa leader, do you provide product knowledge training throughout the year or do they need to motivate themselves to learn?

If the answer to any of these questions falls into the latter, then you know it’s time to refocus on basic product knowledge. Training throughout the year can look like team product challenges, monthly spotlights, and even fun hot-seat questions at staff meetings if your team is extroverted enough!

Why is product knowledge important? On top of being vital that your team knows your retail inside-out in order to consistently and effectively sell it, having everyone onboard with what they’re supposed to know eases potential conflict between team members who feel that they’re being expected to learn too much on their own and spa owners feeling like their staff aren’t motivated enough to self-teach. 

Teamwork makes the dream work, people! Make it easier on yourselves by providing your staff a robust and ongoing training plan to keep their product knowledge sharp. Something I did as a spa owner was to have a rotating “product of the month”, which I would assign to one team member: that team member would then be responsible for writing out the key features and benefits on a cue card. Every day, the designated team member would use that cue card to test/teach the rest of the team on the features and benefits. My team had fun with it in a casual way… and they sure did know the main benefits and key ingredients of each product by the time the month was up!

#2: Improve Your Spa’s Service Support

If bookings are down, it can certainly be due to industry seasonality… but it can also signal that your team may be struggling with providing a service and/or results that customers want.

The results? Low pre-bookings and referrals!

This can come to be due to multiple reasons. The most common, however, are:

• Team members overestimating how proficient they are at a service
• Team members struggling with the technical portions of a service
• Team members not sufficiently communicating the service process to the clients, leading to a lack of understanding
• Team members not communicating using the 80/20 rule and spending most of the treatment time talking about themselves vs offering solutions to the client’s needs  

The fix, spa owners, is to analyze your staff training system and improve the gaps you find are correlating to low bookings. This is especially true if your pre-booking rate is under 60%!

To determine which team members in particular are lagging behind, organize 1:1 or group training to practice on demo bodies or faces. You’ll quickly be able to narrow down who on your team needs some service support TLC!

(And if you need tips for how to structure these trainings without penalizing team members who may not be up to snuff quite yet? Download your very own Spa Team Handbook Template and Tutorial today!)

#3: Improve Your Spa Sales Tracking Support

Do you have a “spa scorecard” yet that tracks both your monthly sales and metrics?

Then this is your sign to start one!

Seriously: it’s time to get on it and use your spa scorecard every month like your spa business’s success depends on it… because it does!

I recommend having one sheet for your spa as a whole and one sheet for each team member– that way you’re using the same metrics for each person and if someone’s stats start dropping, you know to intervene ASAP.

An example of possible metrics to track include:

• Referrals
• Pre-bookings
• Appointments
• Retail sales

Why is this so vital? Because, although it can be hard to acknowledge at times, the reality is that no one will care about your spa business’s success as much as you do– and, as such, it’s up to you to put sales structures in place to help your staff succeed at their roles.

After all, why leave things up to chance when these 3 steps will ensure that you’ve done everything you can to set them up for success? That way, when it’s time to cut team members for poor performance, you have months’ worth of metrics to back up your decision.

Need help getting started, or have more questions about how to jump in to overhauling your team sales protocols? Reach out today!