I can not believe I am sitting in the Riyadh airport going back to Dubai already! This week..... so many great experiences and learning's! The best part is by far and away that the training program went AMAZING and I just can not even tell you how relieved and excited and accomplished I am feeling. We had 100% retention the entire week, not even anyone "sick" during the week- and this may be a no brain thing in the US, but here it is the first time in the partners' history of Riyadh that they have had this happen! Usually they come in for a day and then say "ehh- no" and quit. It is very very common in KSA, however we managed to dazzle and wow and excite our employees so much that we had 100% retention!!! AHHH! So exciting!
But that did not come with out some challenges. Here are some of the things I was up against:
-All men working in our stores (because that is how it is here) to sell our products to women. A huge thing right! Imagine having to do that or see that in the US?
-I didn't speak the language, they didn't speak mine.
-90% of them had never had a job before. Saudi is just now having "nationalization quotoas" whereby brands must hire only Arab Nationals, whereas in Dubai we can hire every nationality. This is why many did not speak english. But seriously- had never had jobs before. So we had to teach "be on time" "this is what a boss does" "you must groom your hair before you come to work" "no baseball caps on the salesfloor" "can't talk on your phone on the sales floor".. The list is endless what we had to cover this week- and then we also had to teach the 1,100 products we have in our store!!!
-They live in a reserved country- but our brand is "fun" "engaging" and "exciting!" so had to figure out how to convey this- again in Arabic. My biggest win was games. They were knocked out by all my training games. I did "Who want's to be a millionare" on PowerPoint. Created 5 different files (in arabic thanks to Google translator- then copied and pasted into power point) so I could get through all the products(with the music and everything). Then we did Jeopardy style game in two teams each day in the morning to recap the previous day and night recap the day.
-Many of them had never used any of our products, so each day they got to take home products to try out and then the next morning they talked about what they had, how it worked, smelled like, and how they would sell. They loved this and even their families got to try out the products.
-Arabic language is a completely different alphabet, so seeing the name of the product was like seeing الجلبان العطر
can't read it can you?? Well that is how it looked to them- foreign and hard to say. So we had to teach speaking/enunciating the names for 1 hour each day. I can totally relate to their pain as I am learning arabic and feel like a 2 year old learning my alphabet, and numbers 1-10 and just that much was harder then hell!! :-)
Overall though, they started on Monday knowing nothing about my brand or our products or our selling, and today when we did the last module of "putting it all together" they were demoing, knew all the products and how to say them, using our selling terms, and REALLY acting like a team! I am tingly all over right now as I write that because it is amazing. Really, only 4 days, and it was life changing. I have never been so challenged to think on my feet and lead, and "make it work" as Tim Gun always said.
--Oh- and I had to edit this one in at the end: Funniest part of the week:
I was on my blackberry while we were showing a slideshow of the Dubai stores and all of a sudden the entire room erupted in a chatter and gasps, and I looked up expecting to see some kind of graphic nudity or horribly grotesque image and what do I see- our "I (heart) brand" poster we had on our cashwrap last month. I was like "STOP THE SHOW!" and had to ask what was going on.
Because it had a "heart" the shape- and red lettering it was essentially like say the F word across the cashwrap to them :-) You are not allowed to use "heart" imagery because it references love which is basically seen as promiscuity, and then the lettering was Red- again- referencing sex. So this pretty floral cashwrap banner we had was like a flashing red XXX "live girls" neon sign in the back of our store. LOL Oh.... can't wait to tell the U.S. guys about this tomorrow.
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