By Harry J. Friedman Founder/CEO, The Friedman Group

Here comes the off-season again. Every year, you hope it will be better and every year, it's never good enough. Until customers figure out a way to sail across ice in the dead of winter, it's going to be slow in the store, so you might as well figure out how to use the extra time to your advantage, especially If you don't merchandise the store with complementary products to help balance the seasons.

Not only do you have the misfortune of decreased sales volume, but the burden of keeping your staff up during the lull. If you've never believed in reincarnation before, one winter in your store makes you a believer. Everyday you watch your staff come to life, just in time to go home!

Let's face it: retail can be incredibly boring during slow times. When a potential buyer finally does come through the doors, the salesperson is so tired from doing nothing all day that it becomes impossible to get motivated for their only chance at making any sale.

When your staff doesn't feel productive, morale and spirits will be down. This contributes to the apathy, which appears when a customer finally does come in. But trying to get the staff morale up is not the answer. Keeping the staff productive, however, will raise morale. Here are some ideas.

Running a game or contest is a wonderful place to start. But, running a contest just to run it is quite ineffective. In fact, you only run a contest to improve a statistic or selling behavior (skill). Even a great contest now may not gain a substantial sales increase, but you can certainly work on the skills. For example, have a contest to see how many customers the salespeople can get into demos as a percentage of the number of opportunities. Your staff will be honing their opening and probing skills. That development is bound to help get more customers into demos when business picks up. Or have a contest to see how many referrals they can generate from past customers and contacts. Oh, the new lead may not produce sales immediately, but planting the seeds now may produce a harvest later.

And just because it's slow is no reason to slack off on your sales training efforts. In fact, now is the time for real staff development, in product knowledge as well as sales and communication skills. Use the time to role play, role play and role play. When you think you've done enough, role play some more.

Now is the perfect opportunity to start and finish a product knowledge library of videos to use in training new and current employees. There will never be enough time to produce them when it's busy and you really need them. So start now and take advantage of this unfortunate luxury of time. Have the salespeople help. They'll love it, and in the process, feel more productive.

It's also the time to start writing or update your store's policy and procedure manuals. Do your spring cleaning. Take some road trips to shop the competition in other cities. Set your goals for the year and do some advance work on advertisement preparation. Attend that seminar you didn't have time to go to last spring. Now is the time for planning and preparation.

I feel compelled to share a story from a retailer I met a couple of years ago. He wasn't in the sailboard business, but an equally drastic business in terms of seasonal ups and downs. I was advising him on a compensation plan and said that I would need to look at two years of monthly figures to make my recommendation. When he gave me the figures, I was surprised to say the least. Every month was so close in terms of sales volume that I couldn't believe it. Naturally I asked him about it.

The owner told me that I wasn't the first to be surprised. He had recently joined a group of retailers across the country to exchange ideas. When they spoke of the problems they experienced during off months, he realized for the first time that it was normal for his industry. When he and his wife started the business, they had no retailing background. Instead of a beat-last-year philosophy, they had been working on a philosophy of beat the last month. Consequently, when a month started looking bad, they pulled out all the stops and did anything they could to squeeze out those sales.

So what's the point? Sometimes you have to be creative and cause sales. Certainly there are principles in advertising that say promote the most when sales will be good and make them stronger, while cutting your losses when sales will be bad. I agree, so I'm certainly not suggesting you should violate this principle. But sometimes you may be giving up too much, too often, because history and the industry say it can't be done.

If you don't think you're going to make any sales, chances are you won't! You have to change your belief system. I have a wonderful example of this with my own sales staff. They market our sales and management programs but don't always make a sale every single day, especially during our off season. During one of our slowest months, I ran a contest. I would give the group a designated dollar amount for every day they made a sale, no matter how small the sale was. It was to be a team effort and bonus. For every day no sale was made, the same dollar amount would be subtracted from their cumulative total. They never missed a day. The contest proved it could be done.

These ideas may not make you millions, but they warrant some thought about how you're doing business now. Take the time to evaluate, plan, think and be creative. It can only help.