Skydiving lessons for surviving a slowdown (part 3)

(Part 3 in a series) In skydiving, you want to prepare for emergencies long before you ever climb aboard the airplane. The same principle holds true with your flooring business. As I mentioned in the previous installments, it’s not a matter of if we’ll hit economic turbulence; it’s a matter of when. With that in mind, I’m going to unpack specific strategies you should deploy right now to ensure your survival when the market takes a nosedive. 

Selling system

Maximizing your closed sales is always important, but when times are tough it’s critical that you make every walk-in or phone call count by having a selling system in place. A selling system is a step-by-step process that walks cold prospects from shopper to buyer, creates differentiation, helps you command higher prices and increases your closed sales ratio.

Recently, I spoke with a dealer who is spending $300K annually in advertising, but their closed sale ratio is only around 30% of all walk-ins. This is the national average, and it means the average dealer is throwing away 70% of their marketing dollars. This is dismal. This dealer had no selling system in place. I told him that if he merely increased his closed sales ratio to 40% he would increase his revenue by a third without spending another dime in advertising, and that a selling system would help him accomplish this. 

Sales training

It’s not enough to have a selling system. You’ve got to train your team on how to use it. Weekly sales team trainings will help ensure that your team masters the system. I recommend holding weekly sales team trainings. Again, if you merely increase your closed sales from 30% of walk-ins to 40%, you’ve given yourself a massive revenue increase. I’ve helped dealers get to 60% to 70% close ratios by training their team on a selling system. That one hour of training becomes the most profitable hour of your week. 

Past client marketing

An effective, proven way to communicate with past clients is to apply the 90/10 formula: Make your blogs 90% fun or informative, with the remaining 10% being about your flooring store, your products and special offers. This enables you to stay in front of your list week after week and have them happy to hear from you—something that’s not possible if you’re constantly spamming them with content that’s 100% advertising pitches.

Here’s a question I ask dealers in my trainings: who owns the contacts on your Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Tik Tok and other social media accounts? Many dealers think they own the contacts. They don’t. The social media company does. And over time these companies have made it more expensive and difficult to directly reach those contacts. The only contacts you own are the ones in your own database or your own files. No one can take those from you. And there are only three ways to guarantee that you reach everyone in your database: email, text and direct mail—not social media. I help the dealers I work with to use all three of these methods. 

In the next installment, I’ll cover more practical strategies you should deploy immediately to survive a market downturn.

Jim is the founder and president of Flooring Success Systems, a company that provides floor dealers with marketing services and coaching to help them attract quality customers, close more sales, get higher margins and work the hours they choose. For information, visit FlooringSuccessSystems.com.