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 [...]
“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 [...]
HomeAdvisor was getting sued by a group of eight home-improvement companies. Here are just two of the several allegations: The leads sold to the companies are “overwhelmingly bogus” and “illusory.” They are often “over distributed” or contain, among other things, disconnected phone numbers, people who are not homeowners or contacts for nonexistent residences. When companies [...]
“I have to cut my margins to compete,” a floor dealer recently complained to me. This is something I hear fairly often. So what’s the solution to preventing margin erosion in a market full of box stores, online discounters, and other cheap price competitors? In a word: differentiation. If you don’t create differentiation, you are [...]
In this installment, I continue with a series of interviews with industry leaders on what they see successful retailers doing to grow their sales, keep margins up and beat the boxes. In the last interview, I sat down with Bob Eady, President of T&L Distributing headquartered in Houston, TX, to get his perspective on what [...]
Dealers are finding it more difficult and expensive to get new customers through advertising. That's why to maximize your success, it’s critical that you maximize the dollars you generate from every sale to maximize your advertising ROI (Return On Investment). Nevertheless, my informal polling of dealers that attend my live seminars and webinars has shown [...]
In Get An Unfair Advantage Over Big Box Stores Part 1, I shared how I was on a coaching call with Mark Bouquet, a Flooring Success System member from the Chicago area who said, "We love having Big Box Stores for neighbors. We take a lot of business from them." In this installment, I will share strategies [...]
Awhile ago I was on a coaching call with Mark Bouquet, a Flooring Success System member from the Chicago area. "We love having Big Box Stores for neighbors," he said. "We take a lot of business from them." (That’s Mark in the photo. I LOVE this pic!) I spewed iced tea as I burst out [...]
