Unless you're a large multi-store chain you probably haven't given much thought to manpower planning. Yet you could be losing sales if your store is not properly staffed. Payroll is your single biggest expense, and it needs to be kept under control. While most retailers do review their payroll dollars, they often fail to review the effectiveness of those dollars. Are you paying five salespeople during times when you could get by with two? Or worse yet, are you losing potential sales because you are understaffed at busy times?

Customers get impatient and frustrated when they have trouble getting served in a retail store. Even if they buy something, they may leave dissatisfied with the quality of service they received. When they have similar needs in the future, the odds are that they'll go elsewhere to shop. Retailers should not lose customers due to inadequate staffing.

You also can't afford to have salespeople concerned about getting customers out the door so quickly that they don't take the time to maximize each sale. Add-on sales are important to your bottom line, and you could be preventing add-ons from occurring if your salespeople have to rush to service everyone in the store.

Before attempting to determine how many salespeople you should have on the floor and when, let's review which salespeople should be on the floor at which times. Let's say you have three full-time salespeople and three or four part-time salespeople. The full-time people probably want to work during the week and have as much of the weekend off as possible. So you use the part-time people to fill in on the weekends when the store is most likely to have a higher traffic volume. This makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Why wouldn't you want your A team working during the busiest hours? You should be using your part-time sales staff on Tuesday mornings when you could go bowling in your store and not hit a customer.

Anyone who is even a little serious about retail should realize that working weekends is reality, especially if all or part of their pay is based on commission. Why would anyone not want to work on the day they stood to make the most sales and therefore earn the most money? As a manager or owner, you must make it clear to your full-time staff that they are expected to work weekends, aside from special requests for a day off from time to time.

Reviewing Your Compensation Structure

If your current pay plan is not structured with some sort of commission or incentive plan, you may be making a grave error. You're not paying your staff based on their sales production. If you don't pay people on their sales production, your staff may be more concerned with getting operational tasks done than making sure that every customer walks out with a purchase.

Reviewing your compensation structure is the first step in manpower planning. Otherwise, you may be underestimating the potential your current sales staff has to sell during their scheduled hours.

Determining the Appropriate Number of Salespeople

The next step is to determine if in fact you do need more people on the floor. For most industries, the simplest way to do this is to look at the sales per hour that your current staff is generating. As a general rule, salespeople should be able to sell at least ten times their hourly wage. If a salesperson earns $5.00 per hour, they should be selling a minimum of $50.00 per hour over the course of a week. The exception to this is in industries that sell high-ticket items such as jewelry, spas or furniture. Here, sales per hour may be inconsequential if the salespeople work on straight commission.

If you find that your store's sale per hour is lower than the ten times factor, you may be overstaffed. You may need to cut hours or simply schedule more efficiently. On the other hand, if sales per hour are significantly higher than the ten times factor, you should add more personnel.

Taking a reading on the register every hour or two for a few weeks will help you to determine if there are times when additional staff should be scheduled or cut back, when to begin a second shift, when to schedule breaks, etc. Look at the number of transactions per hour to get a better estimate of the volume of traffic in your store.

Don't get so wrapped up in the day-to-day chaos that you are unaware of the effectiveness of your payroll dollars. Even more importantly, you don't want potential customers walking out your doors because you are understaffed. Analyze your current staffing situation, fix it and prosper.