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Anatom Academy
In the outdoor industry, every product is technical to some level; fabrics boast amazing technology, walking boots have different treatments or have technical linings, tools do everything but make the tea (unless it's a kettle, obviously). So when it comes to your staff, skimping on training is potentially short-changing your customers. If they don't have the right knowledge to sell the correct gear to the correct customer, you could be missing out on repeat business and recommendations galore.
Anatom specialises in foot-related product like the wonderful TEKO socks, and Superfeet insoles, both of which have a fair amount of science behind them. Anatom as a company takes its training very seriously indeed, because they know the value it gives to customers; Andy Blair explained to us what they do, how they do it and where his own enthusiasm comes from.
SGB: Andy, tell our readers a bit about Anatom...
Andy Blair: Anatom has been in business for close to 15 years. We are distributors of product for the UK, Europe and Scandinavia. We have always looked for technical products because the market is pretty saturated with run-of-the-mill products. We're technically-minded people and want to be a little bit different. We sell products to our customers that are different, and that have a very good technical story. It gives us room to explain product, how it works and how it stands out from our competitors.
We currently represent Superfeet in the UK and Scandinavia and all of mainland Europe. Superfeet is an American-based company, and their parent company is called North West Labs. They come from a very technical background in making orthotics and Superfeet is the over-the-counter version of their medical product.
The other main brand we distribute is TEKO socks, which was new to the UK from January 2008. TEKO has many great features and one of them is that it is technically very sound, offering great products and fibres, but it also has a very strong environmental and ecological story. Again, that gives us a lot to get 'stuck in' to.
The other branch of Anatom, which we take great pride in, is the training division, which is called Anatom Academy. Throughout the year we run specialist footwear training, which covers many aspects - not only of fitting footwear, but biomechanics, how the foot works, how it works in relation to the rest of your body, related problems to poor biomechanics and how to modify footwear. In general, just to up the level of service that consumers are quite rightly looking for these days. By doing that, we feel that it sets a higher standard and will distinguish shops that don't take much care in fitting footwear from the ones that do. We run those courses in Spring and Autumn for the retail trade, and also for private organisations, throughout Europe, all year.
SGB: How does a small shop engage with the Academy?
AB: Anatom Academy is open to our customers who currently buy product from us, but it is also open to potential customers. We use part of the training on product knowledge and how to sell the product for our existing customers. If someone else wants to come on a course, they either need to check out our website or contact our office for details of all the courses for the year. We also run private training courses where companies hire us for a day or two days' training and we look after their staff and our customers that way.
SGB: What's the cost for a company wanting to take part?
AB: A one-day course costs £50 per delegate. That covers all their refreshments, lunch and so on and everyone is fitted up with a pair of Superfeet and a pair of socks to test and try. The two-day course costs £275 and that covers all refreshments, a meal at the end of the first day and also includes some free equipment. On the two-day courses we bring in a lot of outside help to help run the sessions - it's not just me or a member of our staff running it on our own.
Those are pretty full days - the first day consists of an eight- to ten-hour day, we generally start about 8am on the second day and finish about 5pm. We have trade partners to add value, like Grangers who come along and give a talk on footwear care as well.
We also arrange in-shop training, usually consisting of 30 minutes to an hour, hour and a half. We feel the next step is to attend a one-day course, and then hopefully a two-day course.
SGB: What is someone going to be equipped to do, by the training course?
AB: I am ex-retail myself. I have had 15 years experience in Aviemore in a retail environment, managing and partly owning a shop. In general the service we receive throughout the UK within all sectors of the market is poor to very poor. There are just a few shops that shine through. Because I am involved in the training programme and I have also been involved pretty much all my adult life serving and looking after people in one guise or another, I am just totally fixated on service. At the end of the day, service will bring customers back to your store, and hopefully they will spend more money.
They will also tell their friends that they have had great service and good advice, so they will come back to the store, and hopefully spend money. It's all about putting pounds in the till at the end of the day. The better you are at offering a service, with good product knowledge, the easier it is to extract money from people - and they walk away happy, assuming they have been sold the correct products that are suitable for them.
In order to fit footwear better we believe that you have got to know more about the foot, the structure of the foot, the bones within the foot and how it all interconnects with your legs and ultimately the spine. What we do is bring a much higher level of biomechanical knowledge and that helps people understand how the products work in conjunction with footwear. People who have been on our courses report back that they have served a physiotherapist or a doctor with footwear, or even a podiatrist, a foot doctor, and they have commented on how knowledgeable the person was who sold the product to them. They didn't try to oversell, but made a lot of sense in selling it to them. That's great for the shop.
I have been doing this for nearly ten years now, and as I learn more I bring more to the training table. My presentation skills, and how I put it in a certain order has also improved over the years. Basic Anatomic Academy now is backed by product - unless we put the prices up, we couldn't do generic footwear training - so the product does help subsidise the courses. But what we don't do, or try not to do in an open course, is shove product down people's throats. The product generally is not mentioned until well in to the day. It is more about a generic footwear fitting course, but we tie the product in and give examples and demonstrate how the product enhances the footwear, the biomechanics etc. It's a complete story, and the product has to be part of that.
SGB: Do you teach about product positioning, up sells, that kind of thing as well?
AB: On the two-day course there is a section on how to talk to the customer, how to sell and recommend products to the customer. When we're training we're selling, but we're doing it subliminally as well. We try and make it quite broad, so we are not ramming the product we sell down people's throats. On the two-day course there is a whole section where we go through introduction to the customer, ascertaining their needs and then going through a fitting system. If you sell other insoles in your store, you may recommend those anyway. The products we sell are part of the tools that make the fit and the biomechanics work better. If someone has another product, and especially if they feel it is better, then they are free to use that product.
