comment: Paul Laville


“O


ur friendly, knowledgeable experts give you the best advice!”


“We’re a local, family-run business!” “We’re an international chain with an unrivalled service network!” “Our customers matter!” “We go the extra mile!” “We serve our local community!”


Sound familiar? It’s the kind of thing we blast across our websites and shop windows and tell our sales staff to mention when they talk to customers. Nothing wrong with a bit of boasting, we all have to do it, particularly at Christmas when it’s difficult being heard above the noise.


But what if everybody is boasting about the exact same thing? Whenever we hold a sales training session in retail, one of the first things we ask our trainees to do is make a list of all the reasons why someone should buy from their shop. Guaranteed, everyone in the room will put their heads together and excitedly regurgitate all these perceived ‘USPs’ – the ‘unique selling points’ which, they’ve been told and which some may believe, differentiate their business from their competitors. Sometimes we’ll see things like “free delivery and installation” and “we have a price matching policy” and “we’ve invested in a brand-new state- of-the-art showroom” but those six key points I started this piece with always come up. Which means they’re not unique at all. Plenty of independent retailers are family-run and purport to serve their local communities. Pretty much every national retailer I speak to has “an unrivalled service network” and literally everyone “goes the extra mile” because their “customers matter”. I should hope they do. However, once we’ve listed all these claims and stuck them on the wall so they’re visible throughout the day, we’ll ask our trainees a couple of questions on each one. The first question is: “so what?” and the


second, once everyone has recovered from the verbal slap of that first question, is: “how do you demonstrate the value of this claim to your customers?”. For example, what does “we go the extra mile”


actually mean? What is that extra mile really and how do you show it? Besides which, if every


12 | www.ierdaily.co.uk


What makes your


business BETTER? Paul Laville, owner of T21 Group, looks at how independent electrical retailers can get ahead


retailer goes the extra mile, doesn’t that mean they’re all really in the same place? Or does every retailer go a different extra mile?


Here’s another one: What’s the benefit of being a family-run business that’s been in town for 100 years? It’s taken for granted that this is a good one to shout about, but why? Ask yourself, who cares about that? Why should anyone care whether you’ve been around for 100 years or 100 days? A startup competitor will counter this by telling everyone they offer something new and innovative. So why should someone buy from you just because you’ve been around for a century? It might sound harsh, but the point of asking those questions is to force our trainees – and you – to dig deep so that you do understand why it matters and how you can demonstrate the value of the claim. As for “who cares” … it’s an important question


to ask because your target customers might not see the value of your lengthy presence in town, particularly if you want to attract the bright young things in their 20s to your upgraded state- of-the-art showroom. As the training day progresses, every group


activity and key learning point we uncover will go back to those claims we asked our


trainees to list at the start of the day. At some point everyone in the room will begin to see where the real value is and where they can make a meaningful difference to the value and experience they offer their customers, and how they can bring together the various elements of this experience to make it better. Words are not enough. If we all see the same


words every day then they might as well be invisible. It’s actions that count. The value is in the proof of what you do and that is down to your people. Think about it: if every retailer sells the same thing at roughly the same price and everybody goes the extra mile which isn’t really an extra mile at all, the difference is in how all your people on the shop floor, in the warehouse, the back office, on the road, in customers’ houses – it’s how they make your customers’ experience better for them. Your people and what they do are your true USP and that is what you should be boasting about.


Winter 2023/24


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