By Martin Vedris

GOLD COAST: This week Crest Electronics rewarded Bing Lee’s best performers in the company’s recent ‘Complete Attachment Program’ Promotion with a day of advanced sales training followed by a go-kart racing tournament.

The objective of Crest’s ‘Complete Attachment Program’, which ran from 1 April 2007 to 30 June 2007, was to focus the Bing Lee sales team on accessory attachment sales.

The best performers in Bing Lee’s top 10 stores and the Bing Lee merchandising manager AV, Nick Lazaridis, attended Crest’s head office in Brisbane for the company’s level two training from national sales trainer Craig Carr. This was followed by a fast paced afternoon of go-karting on Australia’s largest and fastest track on the Gold Coast.

The go-kart challenge involved three heats and a final. The tournament winners were Velo Petrov of Bing Lee Fyshwick, ACT, who took home the trophy, second was Nick Lazaridis and third was Tai Linh of Bing Lee Homebush.

Crest Electronics’ national account manager Tony Peck indicated that the success of this program and the flow on benefits could see a return of similar promotions in 2008.

“It was fantastic,” Peck told Current.com.au today. “In level two training, we teach them techniques including how to get past that nasty objection that everybody cops when someone walks into the store which is, ‘I’m just looking’.”

Peck said that while the program and training was a success, it can be hard to make a promotion successful if a retail outlet is running a number of promotions simultaneously.

“You can come unstuck no matter how good your promotion is if at the time a retailer has a lot of other promotions going on because you can get lost in the mix,” Peck explained.

“Overall the promotion was awesome. I set my goal at a 17 per cent increase and I think we got an increase of around 23.5 per cent over the three months that we did the promotion.”