With the buzz of the summer sales behind us, it’s doubly important to approach the sales floor with a positive attutude, advises industry training specialist, Adam Hankinson (Furniture Sales Solutions) …
It happens every year. During the summer sale we get a huge rush of customers, and making a sale feels like shooting fish in a barrel – then, once the sale ends, things settle down and we have to start working a little bit harder with our customers.
Feeling a lull is a common occurrence with every furniture retailer that we work with, and it’s something that we think is important to tackle head-on. The last thing we want is for our sales team to be off their game when every sale ends.
Maintain a consistent attitude
This is something that we stress with salespeople again and again. Your attitude should be proactive and not reactive, meaning that every day, rain or shine, you step onto the shop floor with a rock-solid positive attitude.
Crucially, this doesn’t mean that you have to be bouncing off the walls, high-fiving everyone you see – but just being friendly and smiley with every customer, as you would be with a friend you were welcoming into your home.
It’s especially important to overcome a negative outlook after a sale has finished, because this is when many salespeople psych themselves out by assuming that customers won’t buy an item at full price. By deciding the outcome before we’ve even begun, our body language, attitude and tone will unconsciously display our lack of interest to the customer, actually reducing our chances of closing the sale.
If you can create this habit, then it means that even on those inevitable quiet days or periods following a sale, you’ll be able to start with a solid foundation of a positive attitude, rather than a doomed outlook of “the sale’s over, so the store’s going to be dead today”.
Slow it down
One of the big benefits of a quieter showroom is that it gives us a chance to take our time and focus our attention on every customer.
This helps us in a few ways. We can build rapport with the customer, finding out where they’ve come from, if they’ve been visiting other stores, and their plans for the day. These are all great conversation starters that help the customer to relax and begin to open up.
It allows us the time to ask more questions and build a clear picture of what it is exactly that the customer is looking for.
It also takes the pressure off the customer. If we have a relaxed attitude, then the customer is more likely to feel calm as well. Many common objections stem from the customer feeling pressured. “We’re just looking,” and, “We need to go away and think about it,” can be avoided or overcome by maintaining our relaxed demeanour.
Make every sale count
A knock-on effect of slowing the sales process down is that you’ll have the chance to build the value of each sale with the customer. The more able we are to flesh out the picture of what our customer wants, the easier it will be to add additional products.
This doesn’t mean we’ll be chucking in every add-on and random product that we can simply because we have the time. It means that by asking great open questions, especially, “What’s the project?”, we might come across items or add-ons that the customer actually needs, but perhaps didn’t even realise that you could provide.
I’ve witnessed many salespeople asking “Where are you off to next?” only to find out they’re going to a competitor for a product that the salesperson can provide instead.
Key takeaway
It’s easy to get stuck in a predictable cycle of ‘boom then bust’, but implementing these few simple tweaks to our attitude and sales process means we can begin to smooth out many of these dips, making them much more manageable.
