Greetings Flooring Dealers!
Here’s a really simple way to boost your profits.
In the previous installment I discussed how ludicrous it is to spend the lion’s share of your time, energy and money pursuing new prospects, all the while ignoring the only people in the world who have proven they will buy from you: your past clients. In this installment I discuss the “trust factor” and a powerful strategy for marketing to your past clients.
Selling floor covering means earning her trust
Floor covering is all about trust and relationships. After all, you are being invited into your client’s home; their castle; their sanctuary. When a brand new client walks through the door, before you can make the sale you have to do all the hard work of earning their trust first. However, when a past client walks in, the relationship and the trust already exist. But you cannot expect to build and maintain that relationship without consistent, frequent, regular, value-added contact. For every month that goes by without making contact with your past clients, you lose ten percent of them. Ten months with no contact and you might as well be a stranger prowling around their neighborhood.
One of the best ways to maintain relationships with your past clients is through a monthly newsletter. In your newsletter, use infotainment, meaning make your newsletter content a mix of eighty-percent entertainment (fun articles that have nothing to do with floor covering), and twenty-percent information about your business. Why? Because in any given month most of your past clients don’t need floor covering right then, so don’t bore them with 100% floor covering content.
Lifetime Value of a Client
I think the reason so many floor dealers ignore their past clients is because they have never stopped to think about the lifetime value of a client. Meaning, they focus only on the immediate sale rather than taking into account all future sales and referrals from that client. Lifetime value is often times worth five, ten, even twenty times the initial sale. And that’s the power of relationship marketing.
To Tons Of Customers!
Jim Augustus Armstrong is The “Coach”
Jim Augustus Armstrong is the President of Flooring Success Systems, a program that equips dealers to double their profits, cut their work hours in half and beat the boxes! Many dealers have totally transformed their businesses and their lives for the better after joining Flooring Success Systems.
See what real, live dealers are saying!