Plumbing Showroom Sales Problems Are Simply A Pile of Catalogs
I have discussed in previous posts what a huge natural advantage you plumbing showrooms have when it comes to offering expertise and advice. Your customers want to see and touch their options with your guidance.
But even with a receptive DIYer or contractor on the floor, you still have an Achilles’ heel — a blind spot that causes you to lose control of the sales process and your revenue.
It’s when you pull out that giant catalog (or catalogs). This is second nature for many showroom sales folks, and understandably so. But there are a few reasons why this jeopardizes your sale — and why you should think about improving:
- This takes a lot of time. If you’re like most showroom operators, you don’t have the budget to keep an army on the floor. Spending an hour with a customer hunting through printed pages means if somebody else walks in, you have to abandon your conversation (see next point) or make your new arrival wait around. This is bad.
- Your customer gets overwhelmed — especially if they see a bunch of stuff they like, but can’t use (like a wall hung vs. a floor-mounted toilet). The proven psychology of sales tells us that presenting a customer with a curated handful of choices that are a technical fit for their project massively improves your odds of a sale.
- Even after all this is done, they often want to go talk to their spouse, contractor or somebody else. When you say, “Sure! Take the catalog with you!”, you’ve just completely lost control of your sales process. They might get talked out of your product, start shopping your competition…or not act at all!
Imagine This Instead
Instead of inducing anxiety in the customer and burning time by leafing through catalogs, imagine you or your rep talking to them for a few minutes, then punching what they want into an iPad.
In a few seconds, you’re showing them relevant stuff that not only has the right specs, it’s within their budget and style. This style of presentation is far more approachable for your customer, and within the next few minutes you’re narrowed down to color choices instead of boggling them with too many options and degrading the value of your sale.
“I still want to talk to my wife,” your customer says. No problem. You email them the selections you just made together. Now a handful of choices are on their phone instead of a bunch of dog-eared catalogs that will give them too much to think about.
When you help your customers organize their thoughts and find the right options, you maximize your time and theirs. And boost your odds for a sale. You might already have monitors or tablets to augment in-store selection and showcase products. Click here to see how easy it is to take that one step further and use those screens to work smarter and sell more.
