In his new book, Furniture Sales Solutions’ Adam Hankinson, who has spent 45 years on furniture shop floors, makes a simple, measurable promise – one extra sale per salesperson per week. Furniture News asked Adam to explain what’s really going wrong on Britain's shop floors – and what the numbers look like when it’s fixed …
Let’s start with your elevator pitch …
Here’s an uncomfortable truth. If you own a furniture store, orders are being lost every single week – not because your product isn't good enough, not because your showroom isn't beautiful enough, but because of what's happening in the conversations between your salespeople and your customers.
Poor mindset. Missed questions. Prejudged browsers who were actually buyers. Customers who walked out and spent their money somewhere else.
I’ve watched it happen for 45 years. Now I’ve (literally) written the book on fixing it. Selling Furniture: The Million Pound Seller Blueprint is the distillation of four-and-a-half decades of training the UK's top furniture retailers, packaged into a seven-habit framework that any salesperson can learn and any business can measure.
In short, one extra sale, per salesperson, per week – at an AOV of £1,500, with six salespeople over 47 trading weeks – means £423,000 of additional annual revenue.
Acknowledging the potential of what you’re suggesting, what's the biggest mistake furniture salespeople make?
Prejudging customers. Deciding someone isn't buying today – based on how they're dressed, what car they arrived in, whether they said 'just looking' – and therefore not affording them any real time or effort.
That single habit stops conversations before they start. The customer who says 'just looking' is often the one who spends £3,000 if you engage them properly. Salespeople who prejudge never find out. They just wonder why their conversion rate is low.
Are you saying that despite store owners investing in their showrooms, the sales conversation is letting them down?
All the time. I've visited some of the most impressive furniture stores in the world – incredible buildings, beautifully designed showrooms, world-class product. And then you watch what happens when a customer walks in, and there's a gap between the owner's vision for excellence and what's actually being delivered on the sales floor.
The product deserves better. The showroom deserves better. But most owners aren't investing in the one thing that converts all of that into revenue – the skill of the people doing the selling.
Why do you feel that is?
Two reasons. First, they see it as a cost rather than an investment. Second, they worry it will make their salespeople pushy – and that's the last thing a quality furniture retailer wants.
But that's not what professional training does. This is about raising standards, building confidence, and making salespeople more skilled at having genuinely good conversations with customers. The stores that treat training as an investment are the ones taking a larger slice of the market.
Can you outline your Seven Habits framework?
The selling process only works because it matches how customers buy – it's really a buying journey that the salesperson facilitates. Each habit corresponds to a stage in that journey: Mindset, Approach, Foundational Questions, Active Listening, Selling the Solution, Concluding, and Referrals. Miss any one of them and you leave money on the table.
Mindset alone accounts for at least 50% of a salesperson's success. You can teach someone every closing technique in existence, but if they walk onto the floor with the wrong attitude, none of it fires.
You’ve written a whole chapter on ‘active listening’ – what's the issue?
Too many salespeople are on transmit. They're thinking about what to say next rather than hearing what the customer is actually telling them. The customer is giving you everything you need to close the sale – but if you're not listening, you miss it entirely.
Graham Kirkham, who founded DFS and built it into the UK's biggest furniture retailer, identified this as the single major issue in the industry. When someone at that level confirms what you've observed on shop floors for 45 years, it tells you everything.
You also talk about 'black swans' in the sales conversation. What are they?
A black swan is a piece of information the customer doesn't think to tell you, but which completely changes the sale if you don't uncover it.
My favourite example is this – there’s a customer who lives in a lighthouse, so delivery access is going to be a serious issue. Or they may also be mid-renovation, and can't take delivery for four months.
A salesperson who doesn't ask those questions loses the sale when the problems emerge later. A salesperson who does ask – and then explains that the piece is MTO anyway, so ordering now and storing it makes perfect sense – turns a potential obstacle into a reason to buy today.
Black swans are everywhere. You find them by asking better questions and actually listening.
The final habit is Referrals – give us an example of what that looks like …
Hand two business cards to every customer at the end of every sale. Ask them to pass one on. That's it.
One salesperson I work with started doing exactly that in her first three weeks after training. She had three separate comebacks from those cards – all of them orders.
Salespeople don't ask for referrals because they forget, they think it feels desperate, and it's not yet a habit. But if you've done a great job – and most furniture salespeople do – the customer genuinely wants to recommend you. You're just making it easy for them.
What results have you seen when businesses implement this properly?
A 10% uplift in turnover is realistic – and that requires full commitment from leadership and the team, because old habits creep back in. Beyond that, AOV increases by around £150 per transaction. KPIs improve significantly across the board.
Housing Units – one of the largest independent furniture retailers in the UK, trading since 1947 – have worked with us and seen exactly this kind of transformation. Their own assessment was that even their most experienced salespeople found techniques and habits that made a meaningful difference to their results.
What's the role of the manager in making this stick?
This is where most training programmes fail. You do the training, people are energised, and three weeks later it's back to old habits.
The difference is coaching, not managing. Managers look at a figure sheet at the end of the week. Coaches influence behaviour during the sale, in real time, on the floor. A good coach can help a salesperson win a sale they wouldn't have won alone. That's not theoretical – that's a conversion that would have walked out the door. The book has a full chapter for sales leaders on exactly how to make this happen every day.
What about experienced salespeople who think they already know how to sell?
It's a cottage industry, and there can be a lot of people with a closed mindset – they've been doing the job for years and they don't see what they have to learn.
But here's the good news – once you get them in a room and demonstrate that you genuinely understand this industry, 95% of them engage completely. They realise there are refinements they weren't applying consistently, habits they'd dropped, techniques they'd never been shown.
The credibility has to be there from the start. Generic sales training fails with furniture veterans because they can smell inauthenticity immediately. Everything in this programme is grounded specifically in furniture retail.
Is the book itself enough, or is this messaging really about bringing your team in-store?
The book is a complete blueprint – a serious business owner or sales leader can absolutely take it and drive change with it. Think of it as the foundation and the ongoing reference point.
But the reason businesses bring us in is that embedding new habits in an established team requires coaching, accountability, and someone who's seen every objection and every excuse before.
The book starts the conversation. The training programme is where the £400,000 gets unlocked.
What's at stake for owners who don't act on this?
There's £19b spent on furniture in the UK every year. That market doesn't wait for anyone. The businesses that invest in their people's skills will take a larger slice of it. The businesses that don't will keep watching customers walk in, browse, and leave – convinced the problem is footfall, the economy, or the competition.
The customers are coming through the door. The product is on the floor. The opportunity exists every single day. The only question is whether the person standing in front of the customer is equipped to convert it.
What's the ROI for a business that commits to it?
On average, businesses working with us see a minimum 10 x return on their training investment. For every pound spent, £10 comes back to the business.
And critically, this isn't revenue they were already generating, it's incremental. It's orders that would have been lost. Customers who would have walked out. Sales that simply wouldn't have happened without the improved skills of the team. That makes it pure profit the business had no right to expect.
We measure this properly. The international benchmark for evaluating training impact is the Kirkpatrick Model, a four-stage framework used by serious organisations worldwide.
Stage one measures the immediate reaction of participants. Stage two measures what they have actually learned. Stage three measures whether their behaviour on the floor has changed. Stage four – the one that matters most to a business owner – measures the results, namely the revenue impact, the uplift in KPIs, the orders converted that wouldn't have been.
We apply all four stages – not because it sounds impressive, but because it's the only honest way to know whether training is working.
Adam’s book, Selling Furniture: The Million Pound Seller Blueprint, can be ordered from several online bookstores. For training programmes, workshops and keynotes, visit Furniture Sales Solutions’ website.
