Shopfloor PAUL LAVILLE: GROUP CHIEF EXECUTIVE, T21 Training: 52
Are your sales staff ready for the smart home?
Confident, knowledgeable staff are essential to sell smart products, as are demos that immerse the customer in the experience
O
ver the past year or so, T21 has been running sales training programmes with a few retailers starting out on
the smart home.
And written upon the face of every salesperson who stands up to tell us their name and do a little dance (kidding!) we’ve seen every emotion: from unbridled enthusiasm to expectant curiosity to outright fear. Smart home technology, it seems, always provokes an emotional response. The enthusiasm usually comes from those who’ve had some experience of smart tech previously, either in-store or at home, possibly both. The fear comes from those who have somehow managed to steer intentionally clear of it. “I’ve only ever done appliances,” is the
standard refrain from the abstainers, but the irony is that if you’ve been selling appliances, you’re probably better equipped to sell the smart home than those more used to selling boxes of gizmos. There’s a real need for solution-selling and project-management skills when selling bits of kitchens, so if this you, you’re part-way there already. Anyone can pick up the techie detail. You need to know the tech and how it works.
There’s no escaping this, but selling the smart home successfully is also about having the skills, disciplines and attitudes required to juggle a multitude of objectives. Firstly to offer credible, authoritative advice to curious or sceptical customers, then to identify
If your customer interacts with the technology in a way that sparks an emotional connection, then you’re more than halfway to a sale
problems and sell bespoke solutions, blending your technical knowledge with the imagination to create an incredible customer experience that resonates powerfully. And finally, the commercial wit to achieve sales at full value and ensure that relationships with customers buying into the smart home are maintained at the highest level. If you’re thinking “that’s what I do already”, then excellent. We hear that a lot… However, our experience shows that it’s
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56
