Summary

• The need for sustainable retail change, with a shift to conversational selling
• 4,350 people trained in four months
• Retail sales and net promoter scores have risen
• Improved motivation and engagement
• Very positive feedback – 98.4% excellent and good
• Prosell the partner of choice, due to the sustainability of our solution, our track record and our understanding of the business requirements

Company background

Lloydspharmacy is a UK retail pharmacist with 1,650 owned branches throughout the UK. It has three product areas: dispensary, advisory and health services, and over the counter medicines.

What Lloydspharmacy says about Prosell

“It is so refreshing, as an HR professional, to work with a company that is as committed to sustainability and return on investment as we are in the HR leadership team. Working with Prosell has been a highly supportive and appropriately challenging partnership which has brought significant expertise to the success of this programme.”

Barbara Sutherland Head of Capability

The challenge

Since deregulation some years ago, competition has become intense, particularly from supermarkets. Lloydspharmacy’s brand image was not as clearly defined as it should be, thereby not giving enough brand clarity to customers.

In store, staff were friendly to customers, but retail standards were inconsistent, and, in some cases, poor. Some staff thought it wrong, as health professionals, to sell to customers, not realising that when done properly, a sales conversation enhances customer service. With thousands of product lines, there was not sufficient product knowledge, which also needed to be addressed alongside conversational selling skills.

The solution

The HR team consulted operations teams and senior management across the organisation, as well as its commercial and professional clinical standards partner. The result was a brief to three organisations, with Prosell selected as the partner of choice.

The reasons why Lloydspharmacy selected Prosell included:

• We were the only company that talked about the sustainability of the change that was being put in place. We advised the coaching supervisors to deliver that change
• We recognised the challenges that need to be addressed and that it was a programme of change, not a training delivery programme
• We have done this successfully before in a similar environment in the Post Office in the UK

Coaching of supervisors had not been part of the original brief, but Lloydspharmacy fully appreciated the benefits this would bring, not least the embedding of the new behaviours and the sustainability of the change.

The programme was called +ONE and was developed based on 4 Ss:

• Standards – challenging existing standards and coaching the link between standards and sales
• Sales – product pushes, link sales and delivering value-add natural customer conversations
• Service – coaching the connection between sales and service and the impact on the customer
• Sustainability – change for the long term

The programme is supported by the +ONE best practice videos and microsite and has involved 10,500 participants. Over just four months, Prosell ran over 100 workshops for over 1,700  Store Supervisors and took 48 Operational Support Managers through our 5-day Procoach training programme.

Results

Two other major initiatives were introduced concurrently with +ONE, so it is not possible to isolate the impact of +ONE. However, the performance improvement is strong:

• Sales is a common language in the business
• The Net Promoter Score has risen
• Strong financial results – especially in product and link sales. For example OTC sales have grown by a desirable 3%
• Improved motivation and engagement
• Feedback has been very positive – 98.4% rated the workshops as excellent and good.
• High levels of awareness of +ONE
• The programme is owned by the business, not seen as an HR initiative

The next phase of the programme is now being rolled out, with further development for pharmacy managers and area managers, to reinforce the leadership, capability and commercial requirements of their roles.