“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 [...]
“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 [...]
“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 [...]
Greetings Floor Dealers! My goal with this blog is to give you practical, hands-on strategies that you can immediately plug into your flooring business to generate money. Let’s take a look at how a number of these strategies can be assembled together in a marketing blueprint, all reinforcing each other and creating a marketing multiplier [...]
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 this series I answer questions that were asked during the two sales and marketing training sessions I presented for dealers at Surfaces in Las Vegas. What should we say when someone asks the price of a product right at the beginning of the sales process? You don’t want to get into [...]
Greetings Floor Dealers! I had the privilege of presenting two sales and marketing training sessions at Surfaces in Las Vegas to over 300 floor dealers. The sessions were fun and dynamic, with a very enthusiastic group who asked a lot of good questions, some of which I thought would be instructive to highlight here. How [...]
Greetings Floor Dealers! JIM: Here are three strategies which will help you sell at premium prices, but you have to implement all three or none of them will be as effective. FLOOR DEALER: That's a lot of work. JIM: What's more work? Implementing these strategies or staying trapped forever on the cheap-price hamster-wheel of doom? [...]
