Every flooring prospect has an unspoken question on their mind: 'Why should I buy from you instead of your competitor?' If you don’t effectively answer this question you wind up losing customers and competing on price. One effective way to answer this question is by creating differentiation, and I spoke with Lindsey Waldrep, VP of [...]
In Part 1 I explained how Russ Bundy, a dealer from Utah, quickly skyrocketed his net profits by implementing a sales closer system. Part 2 covered details of the in-store portion of the process. In this final installment, I’m going to cover the in-home measure. For most dealers, this is a gigantic missed opportunity to [...]
Greetings Floor Dealers! Flooring is a commodity. Marketing great Dan Kennedy says that if you’re in a commodity business, get out. He didn’t mean leave your industry; he meant re-invent and re-categorize yourself to create differentiation within your industry. Sell differently, answer the phones differently, deliver your goods and services differently. There is so much [...]
Greetings Floor Dealers! “I have to keep my margins down because of my competitors,” said a dealer attending one of my webinars. On a private coaching call another dealer told me, “I live in an area where people expect a big discount.” These are sentiments I’ve heard expressed dozens of ways by dealers from every [...]
Greetings Floor Dealers! In the last post we discussed why in today’s economy it’s critical that you are taking advantage of every selling opportunity; maximizing your closed sale ratio. Here’s an excerpt from the last post: By closing more sales you automatically increase your profits but with ZERO marketing costs. Let’s do the math: Average [...]
Greetings Floor Dealers! During the mortgage meltdown, the massive government bailout, and sweeping political changes over the past several years, many floor dealers struggled with survival - forget prosperity! The flooring industry seriously experienced the fallout, with many dealers severely downsizing or going out of business all together. Why it’s a mistake to simply “hope” [...]
Greetings Floor Dealers! Before I moved to Colorado, there is a lube shop I used to patronize that had such great customer service that I wrote a couple of articles about them, and even talked about them in some of my training manuals for flooring dealers. When I pulled up to the work bay—and before [...]
~ How to create a zero resistance sales environment ~ In Part 3, we discussed, when it comes to charging higher prices, why it’s important to think in terms of the overall selling environment. Environment: the aggregate of surrounding things, conditions, or influences. Today we’ll discuss some specific strategies to create an environment of low price resistance. [...]
~ The Zero Resistance Sales Environment ~ We’ve been discussing the folly of trying to be the “low price leader.” So how do you keep your prices up? To begin with, you must recognize that there is no single thing you can do to charge higher prices. No clever sales phrase, no single product, no newspaper [...]