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I've been working in sales for years now—first in the family's contracting business, and for the last five years in a retail floor covering store. Doing sales has always been challenging here in the very conservative Cincinnati market, and over the years it's gotten even tougher. Competition is greater and consumers think they already know everything.
With today's economic situation, it's even more challenging. Through the years, I've learned that some selling basics are the same, whether you're a contractor or a retailer, and in good times or bad.
First of all, you definitely can't judge a person by what they look like when you first see them. Of course, there are those customers who flaunt it. You saw the car they pulled up in and you can see the rings on their fingers. The ones flaunting it typically aren't afraid of spending money.
There are lots of people, though, who have even more money to spend, but you would never guess it by looking at them. Oftentimes, they're old money, and they're going to stay that way, because they aren't going to part with it! No matter what they look like, the most important step after you greet customers is to talk with them to find out what their needs are and what kind of lifestyle they have in their home, such as if they have kids and dogs. We also talk about what kind of subfloor they have, so we know right away which products are appropriate for their home. We discuss how many rooms they are looking at, and then I try to get a feel for their price point.
You have to let the customer talk. This may sound obvious, but most of us in sales love people and we love to talk, and that can be a problem. When I'm with a customer, there are times when I'll be mentally reminding myself to keep my mouth shut. Especially if customers are on the quiet side, when they start talking, you need to let them talk so you can absorb every bit of information they give you.
As I said, the market here is real conservative, and the majority of what's sold is 2¼-inch oak strip flooring, whether unfinished or prefinished, because it's the cheapest product out there. But you should never just go with what the customer initially says they want; I make sure they are aware of the options. If they're talking about a foyer, I'll show them a medallion, for example. If they have an adjoining dining room, we'll talk about feature strips or borders, or running the flooring on a 45. We have an area in the showroom that shows the different ways to do corners, such as log cabins, miters, Greek keys and French knots, so we'll look at those. If they have a large area, we'll talk about things like using a random-width plank. And we always look at the different species available.
With this being a dog-eat-dog world right now, follow-up is key. You've got to stay in contact with the customers. If people aren't ready to buy, I'll ask for their permission to call them later on the phone. If we've bid it out but they want to wait for the installation until a later date, I'll put them in my folder to call back when they said they'll be ready to install. If I know people are comparing prices, I'll ask them to contact me before they make a final decision, because I want to be sure they're comparing apples to apples (usually they aren't).
Of course, you can't capture every customer. Sometimes you'll work with somebody for months and feel like you've almost become friends with that person, but suddenly they stop returning phone calls. When you eventually manage to speak with them, they reluctantly admit they went with someone else. At that point, instead of getting mad, I try to find out who they went with and why. It's almost always because of price, and it's almost never a comparable product (by then I'm always glad we're on the phone and not face to face).
These days people are more knowledgeable than they used to be, but they're just knowledgeable enough to be dangerous. We have people come in the store who literally have a stack of paper they've printed out off the computer (those tend to be the scientific types). Some of the information is correct, but some of it is not, so you need to re-educate them about the products. I had a customer come in with his wife, and she was getting frustrated because he kept throwing out information, and I kept trying to tell him the correct information. On one issue, about where a product could and couldn't be used, he insisted he was correct. He went out to his car to find the paper proving he was right. His wife apologized while he was gone, and he came back empty-handed and very frustrated. His wife told me later that when he went home and found the information again, he realized I was right.
Diplomacy with customers is really important, but it isn't always easy. There are so many different personality types. The ones who are really detail-oriented (oftentimes engineers, for example) tend to follow you around when you go out to measure their house and immediately ask you for your square footage calculation to see if it matches theirs. Or, they'll bring in drawings and insist that we use those for our measurements, even after we explain that we need to see the real job site and check the transition pieces we need and things like that.
Many times you can tell an extremely difficult customer from your first conversation, either in person or even on the phone. If they have a bad attitude then, that's a red flag that they may be a problem. I try to give people the benefit of the doubt at first—you never know if they just had a bad day— but it usually goes downhill from there. Those customers can be more trouble than they're worth. For example, I had one customer I worked with extensively. He had a terrible attitude from the start, but I worked with him to find product to match the existing discontinued flooring in his home, went to his home to talk about how it would be installed and all the other details. After the product arrived at his house and the crew showed up to install it, he disagreed with what they were going to do and called me. After talking with him, I simply said that it didn't appear he was going to be happy, so it would be better if we refunded his deposit and picked up the material. He was absolutely shocked, but it was the best decision for us—it was less costly to stop the job at that point than to let it go further and head south.
Being in sales right now is tougher than it's been in years, but your sales process doesn't change in times like these. Having the right product knowledge is so important, and you can't be wrapped up in wanting to get the sale so badly that you give them the wrong product. Likewise, you can't be so desperate for a sale that you end up with a customer who ends up costing you money.