sales training: floorcare
This month, Paul Laville at T21 Training
How amazing are your demonstrations? G
reat? or just OK? Does every demonstration result in a sale and a five-star review online?
Reason we ask is that demonstrations are
critical to upping your game when selling floorcare, so are a few other selling skills but we’ll come to those. To create a really powerful demonstration the first thing to understand is that you need to do a lot more than just show the customer a few buttons and tell them how the technology works. If you’re better than this already, great! But read on anyway. We run a lot of test shops with retailers
over the course of a year and one of the common shortfalls we find is a general lack of quality demonstrating. Some products don’t lend themselves easily to instore demos but most floorcare products are a demonstrator’s gift. And yet for every vacuum cleaner that we see demonstrated, every spray mop, dustbuster, stain remover, magic polish or next-gen robot-wotsit with a smartphone app, we see ten at least that aren’t. So what makes a killer demonstration? This is where we enlist another selling
skill, which is the ability to first question and then listen to your customer. Before you start getting the floor wet or plugging anything in you need some key info, such as: What do your customers need the thing to do? What are the biggest problems with whatever they have at the moment? Do they live in a house? A flat? What kind of floors do they have and where? What else needs to be considered – i.e. dogs, cats, sporty children full of mud etc? It’s a bit deeper than what we usually hear, which usually goes something like, “How much are you looking to spend?” Then when they start answering, building up a picture of what goes on at home, you can hone in on details and explore requirements that are specific to your customer. Great! Now you can use this info to show benefits of the product in your demonstration, because here’s the other thing: We find plenty sales people blandly running through features and technology. A lot. Yawn.
Chances are your customer has already done plenty research before they visit
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www.innovativeelectricalretailing.co.uk
Find out what your customers need and what their biggest floorcare issues are - be that pet hair, muddy shoes or simply the need to get the cleaning done as quickly as possible
February / March 2019
you. They’ve looked at everything online, compared prices and spec lists and maybe visited the manufacturer website to try and understand what the technology does - so there’s little point going over the same ground. Even if they haven’t, the tech won’t mean anything unless you find a way to bring it to life, and the best way to do that is to show them how the thing you’re demonstrating delivers a direct benefit to their current situation. Maybe it will make their chores less of a drudge, or be more effective on their type of carpet or flooring, maybe it will save them time, money, be lighter to carry, easier to store and so on. If you want to WOW your customers then showing them how the thing can benefit them right now is the way to do it. It’s also critical that you let your customer
take hold of the thing. Several reasons for this: firstly because they need to feel whether or not they’ll be comfortable using it, secondly because people love it when you show them how to operate cool stuff, thirdly because if they really like it they’ll start to own it in their minds and be more
likely to buy it off you, and thirdly because if you don’t let them touch it then there’s no point in your customer coming to a store to buy it off you in the first place. People value actual retail stores but only if they benefit from something they can’t get online. In other words a first-hand experience of the product. They want to play around with it, test it out, maybe compare a couple of options and ask you a few questions to clarify specific points. In our view it’s criminal if your customers don’t get to touch the thing you’re demonstrating. Finally, a great demonstration is one which
allows you as well as the product to really shine. Because the other thing people don’t get online is YOU, your expertise with the kit, your knowledge, your ability to breathe life into this piece of technology and make it relevant to your customer’s most pressing needs. This is your chance to become The Greatest Showman and make that demonstration impactful and memorable so, as a final word, it’s important that you practice your demonstration to make it so slick that it slides all the way to the till and sparks that 5-star review.
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