Retail Q&A: Find What You Do Really Well and Stick to It

HF’s Andrew Averill spoke with Mark Maly, retail sales manager with Sergenian’s Floor Coverings in Madison, Wis.

What products do you sell?

We will do all flooring—carpet, vinyl, ceramic, wood, linoleum, the popular new LVT products and wood plastic composite. We also do countertops here, but it’s still mainly flooring. We haven’t become the Home Depot of the specialty retailers at this point by selling cabinets and appliances. We do one thing really well and that’s what we’re trying to stay with.

How do you get customers through the door?

Mark Maly, Retail Sales Manager

We do different promotions; not the wild circular thing where it’s all 90 percent off, but we run seasonal promotions. We have our slow periods, like the middle of winter and summer when families are on vacations or it’s too cold, so we’ll have an installation sale. We have a sand and finish promotion that we’ll do in springtime, when people are ready to freshen up their house.

Are you promoting these via traditional channels?

We’ve gone away from TV, but we run our ads mainly in the newspaper and on the radio. We do run a fair amount of social media and internet advertising. We have a regular budget for that. We’ll send out e-blasts six or seven times a year through our buyers’ group, also.

Which avenue has been most successful?

I would say traditionally our radio ads have the most pull.

Do you have any referral programs?

We have several opportunities for referrals. We send cards to customers after the installation and after we follow up with a phone call. If they refer somebody and someone brings that card in, we send them a nice gift certificate. For future jobs with that same customer, we’ll send them a discount card. It’s good for a year. We also have referral fees for designers, builders and contractors for sending people back to us. We’re also very diligent about simply following up after the sale and after the installation to make sure the experience with us was a positive one.

How well do you know your market, from 1–10?

We’re probably only a seven or eight. There are so many new people moving to this area in the Midwest, and South Central Wisconsin, to be more specific, that I don’t know if anyone can be a nine or 10. Hence why we do so much advertising.

Are local trends shifting with the influx of new people?

Some of the newer people and younger people start their own trends, whether that’s a color trend or otherwise. The Midwest, like the Northeast, has always been a solid ¾-inch nail-down, your basic bread-and-butter product. Our business has switched from that to the engineered floors. And the traditional naturals have switched to grays and those sorts of tones. The market is getting a little bit younger with the millennials coming in, and a lot of people are moving into our area from the coasts or the larger cities, and they’re bringing their trends with them.

Is the sales approach different for the newcomers?

We have to keep our staff as knowledgeable as we possibly can because there is so much information out there. People walk in the door sometimes and they’ve researched something to the nth degree. We have to be as prepared as we possibly can, and the people we have here are a good testament to that. Our staff is very good and we try to provide them with the tools to have that knowledge. We try to have weekly product knowledge meetings and bring product reps in here all the time. That’s the difference maker—our knowledgeable staff and the amount of experience we have here really does make a difference.

Is that your edge?

We’re probably never going to be the cheapest guy in town, but we know our stuff and hopefully showed you the path to the right floor for your house. I think that’s a huge factor, definitely the edge for us. Of our 10 salespeople, seven of them have been here more than 10 years, three of those have been here over 20 years. I think that’s a huge plus for us. We’ve got three that are younger who we’re training to get to that level. The seasoned people take them under their wing and teach them the right way. It’s also the experienced administrative people handling schedules and the people estimating jobs. We hear it all the time from customers: They had three other guys doing estimates and nobody asked them the questions our guys did. We try to be the ultimate professionals, and that gets us a lot of jobs.

When you walk into other retailers’ showrooms, what would you change?

When I walk into most places, the big thing I notice is the clutter. That’s one thing that drives me crazy, if you walk in and the place looks like a bomb went off. It’s not professional to me. There are all kinds of amazing distributors and manufacturers out there now, everybody’s product looks really cool. We need to find the ones where they can be important to us, or we can be important to them.

How do you manage that?

Several ways. Mainly I have an initial meeting with people. I look at their product and ask them a bunch of questions about why they think theirs is different or better. If I have a good feeling about it, we’ll have that rep come in and present the product to our entire sales staff. We’ll get a feel for whether they like it, whether it will sell for them. To some extent we get feedback from the sales staff before bringing it in. They pick colors and that sort of thing to make sure they can move it.

Do you prefer large or small manufacturers?

I do a mix of both. I do sometimes look for the small guys because they’ll have some interesting looks. The tough thing about the Shaws and the Mohawks and Dal-Tiles is they’re going to be in every store. Certain types of products we do use the big guys for because of economies of scale, where your pricing is better and we’ll buy more from those types. But the little guys, I love looking at them; that’s the fun part of my job–looking at those cool new things that may be a trend a year from now. It’s so cool and so new, you know it’s not for the Midwest yet, but it will be here in a couple years.