July 9/16, 2018: Volume 34, Issue 2
By Jim Augustus Armstrong
(First of three parts)
In a previous column I outlined the differences between dealers who are hunters and dealers who are ranchers. Most dealers are hunters, meaning they are transaction oriented. They spend their time, energy and money hunting down the next customer—bagging it, skinning it and then hunting for the next one.
There are three big problems with hunting. First, it is very hard work. Hunters wander in search of game. Sometimes they get it; other times they don’t. Dealers try to get good at hunting, but, in reality, customers are price shopping and beating them up about how some box store down the road is offering free installation.
Second, hunting is unpredictable. One day there’s game everywhere, and dealers have all the customers they need. The next day they disappear. The showroom is empty; the phone is growing cobwebs; dealers wonder where all the game went.
Third, hunting keeps dealers stuck on the hamster wheel of doom. They work more and more hours hunting down customers, only to make the same or less. If they do manage to grow, hunting takes so much time and energy that they’ll most likely wind up working harder than necessary.
Ranching changes all of that. A rancher’s job is to round up a relatively small herd of the right customers and live in style. Ranching is easy and predictable compared to hunting. When a herd of customers is rounded up and fenced in, dealers don’t have to wonder where their next one is coming from. Ranching lets dealers escape the wheel of doom, work fewer hours and increase their income.
To help dealers transition from hunter to rancher, I teach them the ultimate floor marketing system. It’s a simple, three-step approach that enables them to round up a highly profitable herd of customers and sell to them for life.
The first step is “Before.” This is what you do to round up lots of new customers before they’ve done business with you.
“During” is the second step, and it’s what you do during the sales process to wow the customer, position yourself as a trusted advisor and close more sales. A strong “During” gets you out of spending all your time preparing and delivering proposals to customers who don’t buy from you. Instead, you put yourself in front of high-quality prospects and get them to say yes.
“After” is the third step. This is what you do after the sale to dramatically increase your repeat and referral business. It lands their next projects for you in a virtually competition-free zone and produces ongoing referrals to their friends and family. This is done using a strategic outreach and messaging process to stay in front of your past customers week in and week out.
The “After” step supercharges your results because you stay connected with your past customers in a very personal way and build real relationships, so you can generate a consistent stream of sales. The Before, During and After system is like having a 12-foot, razor-wire fence to keep your herd of customers in and poachers out.
In the next installment, I’ll dive deeper into what goes into the “Before” step, so you can more effectively round up a herd of high-quality customers.