“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 [...]
To understand why customer recognition is so powerful, let’s take a minute and put ourselves into our customer’s shoes. Cathy Consumer is a 35-year-old mother of three kids, all under the age of ten. She and her husband work full time. Cathy loves her kids and is a devoted mother, but they’re a little weak [...]
Many dealers are running on a hamster wheel faster and faster, trying to build their businesses. One month you have plenty of customers coming in and enough money to cover costs—some months you have more work than you can handle. But then a month or two later your work slows down. You're stressed about where [...]
In Part 1 and Part 2, I outlined the ultimate floor marketing system. It consists of three simple steps: before, during and after. Before is what you do to attract new customers before they have purchased from you. During is what you do to get out of the “proposal” business, close a lot more sales [...]
In my last column, I outlined the ultimate floor marketing system which consists of three simple steps: before, during and after. Before is what you do to attract new customers before they have purchased from you. During is what you do to get out of the “proposal” business and instead close a lot more sales [...]
In my previous post, I outlined the differences between dealers who are hunters and dealers who are ranchers. Most dealers are hunters, meaning they are transaction-oriented. They spend their time, energy and money hunting down the next customer, bagging it, skinning it. Then they’re off hunting for the next one. Three big problems with customer [...]
“How many of you communicate with your past customers on a monthly basis?” I asked dealers at a Digital Domination Boot Camp I was conducting during the Chicago Floor Covering Association’s annual Product Showcase. No one raised their hand. That is not unusual. I poll most of my audiences with that question, and at most I’ll [...]
Statistically, when buying big ticket items ($500 or more), the average consumer spends 79 days on the path-to-purchase. 85% begin their path-to-purchase online. But, 82% of the time they make the actual purchase in a brick-and-mortar store. Therefore, in order to make sure that the path ends at your store instead of a competitor’s, it’s [...]
In the first installment you learned how Earl Swalm, a Canadian floor dealer, took control of his business and grew it by 50% in one year, while at the same time cutting his work hours to less than 35 per week. In this installment I’m going to cover the sales and marketing strategies Earl used [...]
