A friend of mine needed flooring for his home, but he didn’t know any flooring dealers. So, he went online and Googled flooring stores in his area. He looked at the websites and read the reviews of the dealers appearing in the top three search results. All the websites and reviews looked pretty similar, so [...]
There was once a chiropractor who built up a million-dollar-per-year practice. He sold his business, and quickly built another million-dollar practice. Then he did it a third time. Obviously, this man had a system for building successful chiropractic practices. So, he began to host seminars teaching other chiropractors how to grow their businesses. After almost [...]
“Watch what everyone else does – do the opposite. The majority is always wrong.” -Earl Nightingale Most of the sales, marketing, and differentiation strategies I teach floor dealers and write about in this column break convention and completely ignore industry “norms.” I do this because unconventional strategies offer the biggest return on investment for [...]
Selling high-end products like hardwood can be very lucrative for dealers. However, dealers don't sell nearly as much of their high-end lines as they could, so they miss all the additional profits that premium products can generate. I attended the NWFA Wood Expo and spoke with wood manufacturing leaders on the reasons why dealers don’t [...]
“*Flooring World,” the employee answering the phone said in a bored tone when I called for an appointment I had with the store owner. This fellow had no enthusiasm in his voice, and his tone suggested that I had interrupted his day. He obviously didn’t realize—or didn’t care about—the negative impression he was making on [...]
I got a postcard the other day from a company offering their advertising services to help me grow my business. Nothing unusual about that. Except that it came from Google. So, here’s one of the largest digital advertising companies on the planet, a company that did $39.12 billion in revenue during the fourth quarter of [...]
“If ten people walk into your store, how many wind up buying,” I asked the dealer from Connecticut during a coaching call. “Around three,” he replied. “That’s a 30% close rate, which means that 70% of your walk-ins are not buying. Which means 70% the time, energy and money you spend getting people to [...]
“The number one reason customers don’t buy is lack of ‘Wow.’ We’re not losing customers to competitors, we’re losing them to other industries,” said Terry Wheat, founder of RFMS. I was in the audience at Domotex listening to his presentation on selling, and I had to agree. When a customer walks out without buying and [...]
“I want to market my business, but I’m not sure where to start,” the dealer from Arizona told me during a coaching call.“What would you recommend I begin with?” “What are you currently doing?” I replied. “Besides our website, we post pretty regularly on social media, we buy leads from Home Advisor, and we spend [...]
“Our close ratio is only 15%,” the dealer from Florida told me. “Our sales team is wasting a ton of time with people who wind up not buying.” “It sounds like you’re not answering your prospects’ unspoken question,” I replied. “Unspoken question? What's that?” he asked. When I bring up the unspoken question, most dealers [...]
