Greetings Floor Dealers!

“There is no relationship between being good and getting paid.  There is a relationship between being a good marketer and getting paid.”
-Joe Polish

“I’ve got a lady on the phone who wants a quote,” my assistant told me, holding her hand over the phone.

“Great, schedule an appointment,” I said.

“Well…she got our number through the yellow pages.”

“You know what to do,” I said.

“Give her an estimate over the phone that’s double our normal rate,” she replied.  “I’m on it.”

That usually solved the problem.

This was back during the first year or so of owning a carpet cleaning company, and we were positioning ourselves as the high-end, premium company (i.e. expensive).  We quickly discovered that a yellow page call meant only one thing: a price shopper; definitely not our ideal client.

For new clients our policy was never to give quotes over the phone: we’d always schedule an in-home Carpet Audit where they would be given an exact quote.  (The Carpet Audit was similar in principle to the Design Audit I now teach to floor dealers.)   Problem was, we knew from the outset that since yellow page calls virtually never resulted in a sale, the hour we’d spend driving out and doing the Carpet Audit would be totally wasted.

But we were stuck with that YP ad for the entire year.  Believe me, if I could have waved a magic wand and made that ad disappear from all the phone books I would have done it.  I did not want those calls.  So I came up with a solution.  We always, always, always asked how people heard about us when they called so we could track our marketing.  (Did I mention always?)  So for yellow page calls we changed our procedure: instead of scheduling a time-consuming Carpet Audit for someone unlikely to hire us, we would give them a preliminary estimate over the phone that was double our normal rate. That got rid of 95% of the yellow page calls.  For the tiny percentage that still wanted to hire us, we would schedule the Carpet Audit and quote them our regular rate once the floors were measured.

This is an example of sifting, sorting and screening.

(On a side note, it’s possible to have a yellow page ad that sifts, sorts and screens; by using free recorded consumer awareness messages, testimonials, “eavesdrop” hot lines, secondary response mechanisms, guarantees, etc., you can differentiate yourself from all the other companies and promote yourself on the basis of benefits rather than price.  Including a line that says, “Were not the cheapest, just the best” lets everyone know that price shoppers need not apply.  If you’re a Platinum member you can find yellow page examples on the members only site.  Unfortunately, however, this was early in my marketing education and my yellow page ad sucked as bad as all the other carpet cleaner’s ads.  Good coaching solved this problem, though.)

Done correctly, marketing will bring you clients who are

  • Pre-motivated
  • Pre-qualified
  • Pre-interested
  • Pre-disposed (to do business with you)

In other words, good marketing sifts, sorts and screens, leaving you only with people you want to work with.  This not only saves you a lot of time, it protects you and your sales team from the psychological wear-and-tear of dealing with negative, whiny, suspicious-of-everybody, complaining, penny-pinching, tire-kicking, price-shopping cheapskates.  The entrepreneurial game is (everyone say it together) 90% mental!  How many times has your entire morning been soured because of one crappy customer?  Yes, you need to learn to deal with the occasional negative person (see my “Tail Between The Legs Philosophy” article coming in next month’s newsletter), but you need to do everything you can to minimize the number of negative people who get in your front door.  Sifting, sorting and screening are how you do this.

How to get a huge list of clients who are already sifted, sorted and screened…FREE!

Yes it is possible, but you can’t buy this list.  You have to build it yourself, and if you’ve been in business for any length of time you have already done so.  I’m talking about past clients.  People who have purchased from you in the past are the only sentient beings in the known universe who have proven that they will give you money for flooring products and services.  In other words, you already have an entire database of people who have been sifted, sorted and screened.

That list is worth a fortune.

So the first step in harnessing the massive profit potential of sifting, sorting and screening is to nurture and protect your relationship with the sifted, sorted and screened clients you already have.   This means ongoing communication with them an absolute minimum of 12 times per year, and the absolute best way to do this is with a monthly newsletter.  Your newsletter should be fun, informative, welcome, entertaining communication that’s a mix of 80% fun stuff, with 20% dedicated to flooring and special offers.  It should have 6-10 emotional triggers in every issue that compels people to read, respond and refer.  (The Home Advisor is exactly that, and if you’re in Platinum you should be using it.  If you’re not in Platinum, that’s the formula you want to follow in creating your own.  DO NOT copy the boring “snooze-letters” sent out by your insurance or investment company.)  The newsletter should be printed and MAILED to them.  Don’t get cheap on this and use e-newsletters.  They have little implied value and are too easy to “delete.”  You can use e-newsletters as a supplement to the printed letter, but not as a substitute.

Another sift, sort and screen strategy that dovetails with this one is actively marketing for referrals.  All other things being equal, people want to work with those they know, like and trust.  With a referral you are going in on borrowed trust.  Referrals have already been sifted, sorted and screened by the person who referred them.

Another closely related strategy is joint ventures.  If you have other businesses sending you referrals, these clients have also been sifted, sorted and screened.

(If you’re in Platinum, you have access to the Joint Ventures module and the entire referral system, including the Reticular Activator campaign.  If you’re not in Platinum, you need to develop a system that actively markets to your current clients for immediate referrals.  Most referrals are ‘happy accidents’: if you do a good job long enough, eventually you’ll get referrals.  In the New Economy it’s critical that you go beyond ‘happy accidents’ and incorporate marketing systems that operate continuously to bring you an ongoing stream of referrals.  When you open a new job file, certain tasks get done every time, day-in, day-out: order product, notify the client when it arrives, schedule the installation, etc.  Any system for getting referrals needs to happen with the same day-in, day-out regularity.)

Into the cold, cold marketplace where they eat their young every day

Okay, let’s assume you have all your past-client, referral and joint venture “sift, sort and screen” marketing systems up and running.  Now, and only now, is it time to begin marketing to cold prospects.  (I define cold prospects as people who have never bought from you and have not been referred.)

Unlike repeat/referral business, these people have NOT been sifted, sorted and screened.  Therefore your marketing needs to do this before they ever set foot in your store.  Let’s look at three examples:

Yellow Pages

I already talked about this, but I have a couple of more observations.  Yellow pages are notorious price-shopper magnets.  (I can almost see everyone nodding ruefully at this statement.)  I’ve talked with dealers (not Inner Circle members) who are spending $20,000+ on YP and getting pitiful results, yet they are completely willing to keep shelling out money out of some misguided idea that they have to be there because their competitor’s are also there.

I’ve heard dealers say that they are in the yellow pages so their customers can find them.  This is really bad thinking.  First of all, your clients should be hearing from you every month, so there should never, ever, ever be a reason they have to “find” you.  Second, by sending your clients to the yellow pages to find you, you are sending them to the one place where all your competitors lurk.

The yellow pages are rapidly being replaced by the internet.

Frankly, I think you can have a perfectly successful business and never be in the yellow pages.  I think it was a negligibly effective medium 10 years ago, and it’s growing less so by the month.  However, in some markets they can still work, so if you decide to have a presence there you need to keep some things in mind:

  • The vast majority of people go to the yellow pages is because they have no prior relationship with a floor dealer.  They are “free agents.”  Therefore, sift, sort and screen strategies are a must.   I knew of a carpet cleaning company that did not list their office phone number in the ad, just the 800-number to their free Consumer Awareness message.  This forced any potential prospect to listen to an educational message about how to choose a carpet cleaner before they could get the main phone number.  (Platinum members, see module-8 in the 60-Day Rapid Launch for Consumer Awareness line scripts, etc.  Everyone reading this can go to the Strategic Alliance Partners page in this newsletter and get info about Automatic Response Technologies and a promo code to save you on set up costs.  I use ART for free recorded messages and voice blast.  They’ll be happy to help you get set up.)
  • If you have an ad that worked well in another broad-based medium (newspaper, magazine, website landing page), test this as a YP ad.
  • Unless you have an ample supply of “luxury” marketing dollars, test a smaller ad before investing in a full page.
  • Carefully track your results.  If you get enough sales to more than pay for the ad (as opposed to getting lots of mere walk-in’s) and you have a referral system in place to maximize the profits from those sales, then you should consider staying in the yellow pages.
  • But if the numbers don’t add up, get out.  There is no reason to throw money away on any medium that’s not paying for itself, especially yellow pages.  There used to be a “credibility factor” with being in the yellow pages; being there meant you were an established, “respectable” business.  The internet has largely taken over this function.

Newspaper

The nice thing about newspaper is you aren’t committing to running a single ad for a year.  Even if you sign a one-year contract, you can test multiple incarnations of your ad.  (BTW, you should never sign a long-term contract until you have tested the newspaper in your market area for several months and carefully tracked your results.)

Your ad should include testimonials, secondary response mechanisms (free recorded message, website, testimonial hotline), powerful guarantees, language that differentiates you from all the other dealers (Design Audit; 100% Iron-Clad, Triple Guarantee), and a unique offer (i.e. Purchase in January and get an extra 12.4% of FREE flooring!).

If the ad is too small to fit all those elements, use the ad to drive them to another medium where they can get your entire marketing message, such as a website or free recorded message. For example:

WARNING:  Don’t call or visit any floor dealer until you get the Consumer’s Guide To Floor Covering.  You’ll learn:

  • 7 costly misconceptions about floor covering
  • 6 mistakes to avoid when choosing a floor covering store
  • The 3 “Dirty Little Secrets” about installation that floor covering dealers pray you NEVER find out

Go to www.JimbosFloors.com for your free copy, or call us at 530-790-3338.

Website

Like I said earlier, the internet has largely supplanted YP as the “credibility builder,” and is now the go-to medium for most people looking for any product or service, including floors.  It’s only a matter of time before yellow pages go the way of buggy whips and manual typewriters.  I definitely recommend having a web site if for no other reason than the credibility.  However, if your site is saying basically the same thing as all the other sites, it will be just as useless as having a copycat yellow page ad.  It will be nothing but an electronic price-shopper magnet.

Most web designers and marketing companies talk about web “presence.”  This is tech-talk for “traditional,” brand-name-building advertising to “get your name out there.”   Same philosophy, different lingo.  And you all know what I think of “traditional” ads: they are mostly useless.  And just because you put them on the internet and call it “web presence” doesn’t make the approach any more effective.

Whether you’re on the internet or anywhere else, you still have to answer the unspoken question on every prospect’s mind:

“Why should I do business with you versus every competitive option available to me, including doing nothing?”

If you’re only answer is, “Uh…I have a really cool website with lotsa purdy pictures,” then they’re no more likely to buy from you as anyone else, and they’re probably going to buy from whoever has the cheapest price.

The web gives you lots of ways to answer this question, and do some major sifting, sorting and screening.  Also, you can tweak and rework websites quickly with little cost.  Here are some sifting, sorting elements to include:

  • Testimonials.  The web enables you to use audio and video testimonials.  Very powerful.
  • Powerful Guarantees.
  • Offer a FREE Design Audit.
  • Consumer’s Guide To Floor Covering

 

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.
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