Greetings Floor Dealers!
Does this story sound familiar?
First, a customer walks into your store and spends an hour or more looking at samples. Then you have to drive out to her home, spend time chatting, and measure all the floors. Then you have to go back to your store, figure up the square footage, and get pricing from your distributor. Then you’ve got to put it all together into a bid and deliver it to her. You’ve got four hours—half a day—into this darn thing. And it turns out that all the customer wanted was confirmation that they are getting a good deal from your competitor. She jerked you around. How does it feel to be jerked around for half a day so the customer can feel better about going with one of your competitors?
To cold, hard truth is that in today’s world of stand-offish, price-sensitive consumers, if you don’t have a system for selling, you’ll always be at the mercy of your customer’s system for buying. And their system for buying is to shop you. They’ll come into your store, waste hours of your valuable time, use you for advice, then buy from Home Depot, or go online and buy from Lumber Liquidators.
If you want to build a business with 40-50% margins (or more), you’ve got to have a Sales Closer System in place so that you control the sales process. A good Sales Closer System will do several important jobs for you.
First, as stated earlier, it gives you total control of the process from the second a customer walks in your door. If you don’t control the process, your customer will. And that means getting beat up on price, lost sales, and stomach ulcers.
Second, a good Sales Closer System quickly weeds out tire-kicking, price-shopping “bottom feeders.” Some people are loyal to quality, some are loyal to price. About 10% of the population is totally loyal to cheapest price. They don’t care about quality. They don’t care about service. They are hard-wired to buy from whoever is the cheapest. They are also hard wired to complain, cause problems, be suspicious, use you for your expertise and then buy elsewhere, and give you migraines. This is why I call them “bottom feeders.” They are bad news, and you do not want them as customers. Once you identify a bottom feeder, send them to your competitor. Let them have the headache.
Third, a good Sales Closer System differentiates you from competitors. If you don’t create differentiation, you are forcing your customers to make a decision based on price. The sales process is a huge opportunity to totally, completely, and utterly separate yourself from all the other dealers in your area.
Fourth, a good Sales Closer System automatically switches “shoppers” into “buyers.” When a new customer walks into your store, she is often in “shopping” mode, not “buying” mode. The dealer who gets the sale is the one that’s in front of her at that critical moment when she makes that switch to “buyer.” If your sales process doesn’t quickly move her from “shopper” to “buyer,” she’ll walk out your door and your competitor will steal the sale from you.
Average dealers “luck into” sales because they happen to be in front of a customer when they make the “switch.” It’s not because they have a Sales Closer System in place. They just lucked out. Well, if you want to command margins of 40-50% or more you can’t depend on luck.
In the next installment, I’m going to cover critical elements that you should build into your Sales Closer System to insure that these four jobs happen.
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!