By: Aria Spears
Your school might already be a-buzz about the holidays. The holidays are a special time not only to gather with family and friends but can also be a great sales period for your Spirit Box team! With some time and intention, you can make sure your Spirit Box is good to go when students are on the search for timely and helpful products to finish out the calendar year.
In short, to get ready for the holidays, you should: clarify last year’s sales numbers, determine your product mix, create your marketing and promotion plan, design your promotional materials, provide customer service training refreshers, maintain your Spirit Box, plan your giving and create contingency plans.
To get a more in-depth take on how to prepare your Spirit Box and Spirit Box team for the holidays, keep reading!
Run Last Year’s Numbers
If your Spirit Box has been around for at least a year, you should have the data from last year’s sales. Ask the team member(s) in charge of finance to run a report on the top-selling items from last year’s efforts. Your team may have sold only through the Spirit Box itself or you may have additional sales at school games or events. Whatever your team’s sales strategy was for the year, gather reports from all of these sales activities to determine what products and services were most popular.
Decide on Your Products
After reviewing these reports with the team, you can work together to determine what specific, limited-time, and ongoing products you’d like to sell during the peak holiday season. Perhaps you’ll bring back some favorites from last year and also add in some new products to give extra incentive for students to visit your Spirit Box. Learn more about production here and about creating a product mix here.
Establish Your Marketing & Promotion Plan
Once you decide on the products you’ll want to sell at different points in the holiday season, you can then craft your marketing and promotions plans. How are you going to let students, teachers, and parents know about what you’re offering? Consider how you might integrate online and offline strategies to reach different audiences and remind people of what your Spirit Box offers. You can also consider how you will match promotions to relevant events happening at your school. For example, during finals week, your Spirit Box team could promote Finals Survival Kits to parents so they could purchase one to be delivered to their students at the start of the school day to encourage them. Learn more about marketing your Spirit Box here.
Create Amazing Promo Designs
After deciding on the channels you want to use to market your products and offers, consider how you can create a cohesive design for these promos online and offline. What will you use to generate excitement and interest in the products? How will you entice fellow students to stop and see what’s being sold for the holidays? Get creative and let your team’s design skills shine!
Provide Extra Customer Experience Training
Holidays can be a very intense sales time for those offering customer service. Potentially long lines, delayed products, and more can cause challenges in creating an amazing customer experience. If needed, offer a refresher to those working in different customer experience roles in peak sales times. Remind them about what professionalism looks like for your team and how customer experience can have a huge impact on whether your team reaches its sales goals for the term. Don’t assume people will “just know”—refreshing their memory can only help the business and the customers they’ll see!
Work on Your Spirit Box Machine Maintenance
Next, because holidays are peak sales periods, make sure your Spirit Box is up to date on any maintenance. You don’t want to lose sales because a customer couldn’t get a product from the machine! Ensure your coins are well-stocked and all of the hardware and software for the Spirit Box are running effectively. If you encounter a problem you’re not sure how to solve, contact us and we can help!
Determine Holiday Giving
Holidays are not just about turning a profit. They can be a great time to give back to your community, too! Your Spirit Box team might want to create an initiative to give back to an organization in your area, such as a food bank or other nonprofit. Work with the team to figure out whether you’d like to include some kind of food/clothing drive or other type of donation-based effort in your sales and promo efforts. This is a simple way to use your platform in school for good. Other groups in the school may already have an initiative planned—how can your marketing team help to boost their efforts? Maybe you can donate some time to create really fun graphic posters or social media posts to collaborate.
Plan for Challenges
It’s always good to have a contingency plan when you’re in business. And it’s no different when you run a Spirit Box! Holidays can sometimes come with weather events that create challenges for your team to reach sales goals. What happens if your school loses power? Or what if there is a week of online, at-home school due to snow or ice? If your school might have to deal with these kinds of issues, be sure you prepare ahead of time. Maybe weather isn’t a challenge, but what if your Spirit Box has a malfunction and you can’t use it for a few days while it is fixed? Considering these possibilities ahead of time means you’ll have a plan and can execute it immediately when challenges arise.
Data & Sales
Lastly, be sure you have your data and sales tracking tools in order. Your Spirit Box automatically tracks your sales, but if you are doing other kinds of sales such as before and after football games, be sure everyone working knows how to track sales effectively. This is important for you to have an accurate measure of success so your team can maintain real-time awareness of what products are working and which are not. Utilizing this data, you can adjust your sales strategy in real-time to account for unexpected sales patterns. Need help with understanding your data and reporting features on your Spirit Box? Contact us!
Ready, Set, Go!
The holidays are a great time to practice teamwork and test efficiency. It is also a great time to learn how to operate your business more effectively. Working together with your Spirit Box team, we hope this is your best holiday season yet!
Spirit Box is a turn-key entrepreneurial solution for high school stores. Students get real-world business experience in customer service, financial management, product development, and more. Learn more about how schools are launching profitable stores here.