Protection Plan Goals: A Cycle!

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It’s clearly a good thing for us to have goals that we want to achieve. We want to reach a certain Protection Plan attachment rate and we’ll set milestones along the way to getting there. But then we have a bad day or week, and the disappointment makes us feel like we may have set the wrong goals or maybe we aren’t capable of reaching where we want to go. Part of the reason is because in the ever-changing world of retail, our path is not often linear like this:

Setting Goals -> What Happens In Between -> Achieving Goals

We had a successful Protection Plan manager who once told us “Customers sometimes get in the way of achieving our goals.” It’s funny, because our store can’t exist without customers, but it absolutely speaks to how different working with customers is than other industries like manufacturing, building, or shipping. We’ll always have a customer who responds to our Protection Plan in a new, completely different manner than what we’re used to. In our world it makes more sense to think cyclical instead of linear when it comes to goals. We need to embrace the uniqueness of our customers’ actions by expecting our path to not always be straight

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Instead of approaching every customer with the goal of selling a Protection Plan, set a goal of “What am I going to learn about customers and Protection Plans today?” Begin your day recognizing that you’re going to learn another approach, another objection, another answer, etc. about offering Protection Plans in the store—whether or not every customer buys protection. It’s a cycle that you’ll be repeating every day, and as long as you’re learning something new each day your cycles will combine to an upward spiral to achieving your long-term Protection Plan goals (like higher attachment rates). Thinking cyclical is a closer approximation of how our retail world works!

This week approach every customer interaction as part of your cycle of learning, spiraling you upward to your goals. Whenever you or someone in your store finishes helping a customer, review together what you learned from that customer: there’s always something to learn! Not only will it keep you engaged and positive, it’s also a great way to…Make It Happen!

Quick read: We interact with unique personalities all day, and our goal setting needs to recognize that randomness. Learning from every interaction allows us to take a cyclical approach to goals that accepts the non-linear reality of retail.

Note: This selling tip was inspired by Anne-Laure Le Cunff ’s excellent article “The Paradox of Goals .”