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At a GlanceName: Country Side Carpets and Interiors |
HF’s Andrew Averill spoke with Rich Cooper, co-owner of Country Side Carpets and Interiors, a retailer in Missouri that sells all floor covering types.
How is your hardwood display unique?
One side of the entire building features an array of hardwood flooring installed up on the wall. We showcase all the unique characteristics of the different graining in wood products, from oak to maple to birch to cherries, to everything across the board, ashes, hickory, you name it. We try to display products in all applications, from hand-scraped to furniture-grade finishing to something with a wire brush. We show them the whole gamut.
Rich Cooper - Co-owner
How would a customer use the wall?
They walk in and take a look, and they’ll say something like, “Man I really love this ash graining and I like that it’s a cleaner look than oak, but I really like this color you’re displaying over here in the maple. Do you have anything like that?”
What do your salespeople do next?
We’ve just minimized the flip-through-the-sample-book part that every customer goes through, and now we know what their question is—the Holy Grail. They want an ash, they want it in that color and then it’s up to the salespeople to really intimately know the merchandise on the floor to pair the customer with the end result they desire. The customer will be satisfied with the final product because they had a visual understanding of what it will be before they left the store. The wall has other benefits. We get to negotiate a really strong position with the manufacturers that are represented up there.
Do you still have a flip-book of samples?
No, what we do have is a catalog of images we’ve taken of all of our past projects. When we complete each project, we ask permission. We tell the customer we won’t put down their name or address, we’d just like to take a photo. Everybody is proud of their homes. The photos show how well our guys deliver. I tell our salespeople all the time that you can buy a gallon of paint in about 700 stores. It may be a great color and last forever, but it’s not worth much if that guy holding the brush is no good. Our salespeople need to highlight why we’re the right party to choose to hold the brush.
What do you look for in a sales person?
A person who truly looks at the individual and wants to know who they are. When a customer walks in the door, any time I see a salesperson go and grab samples and start talking to them about floors, I think they’re missing the mark. We’re not trying to create a sale. We’re trying to create a customer. I want a salesperson who sits down, talks with the customer and figures out what their motivation is.
How do you interview for that person?
When it comes to pricing and the books, that’s just all mechanical. When I sit down with the interviewee, our interview goes like this: “Tell us what you like about purchasing things. Tell us what your positive experiences were like when you bought things. Tell us about places you’d never go to again.” If that person fumbles for answers, that’s not someone you want talking to people. If they have the mentality where they’re thinking about that stuff outside of work, and they’ve had a genuine positive experience, we tell them, “That’s what our customers want from you.” They’ll be a successful candidate here.
When would you fire someone on your staff?
Genuine mistakes happen. Those people are OK. If the mistake comes from a person who knows the company inside and out, can recite protocols chapter and verse, but they have an apathetic feeling toward their work? The bottom line is I’m very polite, I’m not a screamer, cusser, yeller or what have you, but I fire them. When I was younger, I wanted to make people more successful than they wanted to be themselves. I’m done doing that now, in my older years.
Have you ever fired someone who didn’t make any mistakes?
If you have a square peg in a round hole, I don’t care how good they are at that job, that’s not a person who is happy. I’ve had to fire people who had a great attitude, who had a desire to do the job right. It’s difficult to say that I made a tactical error by putting the square peg into a round hole. I’ll tell them, “I know you want to do the job right, but I tricked you, and by gosh this is my fault, but I have to let you go because this is what I really believe are your skillsets after thinking about this, and we just don’t have a job for that right now.” People need to get about their lives doing what they were designed to do.
