In short: who is really selling only becomes clear when you measure a conversion rate for each salesperson rather than total takings at the till. Cross-reference the exact number of entries during a shift against the sales report: someone who closed eight sales out of ten entries is a strategic asset even on a quiet day. Give focused training to anyone converting poorly despite high footfall, and reward improvement in conversion rate rather than commission on turnover alone.

A salesperson who smiles at customers and creates a good atmosphere is an asset, but at the end of the day a business lives on the bottom line.

The trouble is that most owners measure their team on one metric only:

how much money came through the till on your shift?

That is a misleading measure, and it can make you miss your smartest salespeople.

The managerial problem

When you look only at total sales, you don't see the lost opportunities.

Salesperson A may have taken ₪5,000 on a busy day when 200 people came into the shop, while salesperson B took "only" ₪3,000 on a wet, quiet day when just 20 people came in.

Without cross-referencing footfall data (how many people the salesperson met) against sales data (how many of them they persuaded to buy), you may hand a bonus to the wrong person and leave your most capable seller feeling short-changed.

The modern management answer

Modern management measures a conversion rate for every salesperson.

The aim is to understand how much ammunition each person was given (customer footfall) and what they did with it. Monitoring tools let you see who genuinely closes a deal and who simply stood there while customers queued at the till anyway.

💡 Putting it into practice: measuring the team's effectiveness

  • Analyse potential against performance
    • The manual way — looking at the sales report at the end of the day and guessing whether it was busy from how flustered the salesperson looks. That is management by impression, not by fact.
    • The technological way — cross-reference the exact number of entries recorded by Eyezapp during the shift with the sales report from the till. If 10 customers came in and 8 sales were made, that salesperson is a strategic asset even if the total sum is low.
  • Identify skill gaps — use the reports to spot salespeople with a low conversion rate despite high footfall. Don't fire them — give them focused sales training on the products that had high exposure in those hours and didn't sell.
  • A data-based incentive model — instead of commission on total sales alone, create an incentive for improving the conversion rate on their shift.

That pushes salespeople to approach every customer who walks in, even in quiet hours, because every entry that doesn't become a sale hurts their own metric.