Furniture Sales Training: Customer Engagement Creates More Sales

  
When we engage our customers, we enter a new sphere of opportunity. With engagement, relationships are both quicker to form and deeper. We find it easier to develop two-way trust and understanding. Shoppers are more likely to buy from a sales professional with whom they are engaged than from one with whom they are not engaged.

My wife and I visited a furniture store last weekend. While my wife and I enjoyed our shopping, we had a disappointing experience, both the from the shopper perspective and also from the sales trainer perspective.

Here's a script that shows an approximation of the conversation we had with our furniture salesperson:

* * * * * * *

Salesperson: "Welcome to XYZ furniture gallery."

Skip: "Thanks" (while feeling the cushions on a sofa).

Skip's Wife: "Thank you." (while sitting down in same sofa).

Salesperson: "That's one of my favorite sofas. I just love it."

Skip's Wife: "Oh, okay."

Salesperson: "Do you need a new sofa?"

Skip: "Yes, we need a new sofa. But we're not looking to buy one today, we just happened to notice it as we were walking by."

Skip's Wife: "We do need a sofa but we're not going to buy one today. It's not a priority right now."

Salesperson: "Oh, okay! I don't know if you have been in before, but we're a custom order store. We can custom order any of the sofas you see in our store in any of our fabrics. And we have free design services, I don't know if you knew that or not."

Skip: [pleasantly] "Yes, we've been in before and yes, we did know that."

Skip's Wife: "Okay, great!"

Salesperson: [smiling] "Okay, my name is XXXXXX, just let me know if you have any questions."

Skip's Wife: "Okay, we'll do that."

Skip: "Okay, that sounds good."

* * * * * * *

Did the salesperson identify why we were visiting her store? Did she get us actively involved in the buying/selling process?

This scenario is repeated in thousands of furniture stores and other retail venues each and every day. Sadly, there was little or no attempt to engage the customer. Despite the high cost of getting a prospect into a furniture store (or any store), these opportunities are wasted over and over again at retailing establishments across the land.

What could have this salesperson done differently to engage my wife and I? What would have turned this encounter into an engaging one instead of a typical, bland, uneventful one?

Here are three ways to help your retail salespeople become engagers:

1. Focus on the prospect, not the product.

We sometimes forget that our prospects are real, live human beings with real lives, worries, concerns, joys, priorities, goals, biases, questions, needs, desires, perspectives, etc. If we drill down far enough, we can usually see that prospects are not coming into our stores for our products, they are coming into our stores for their lives. Our products are merely one possible route to make their lives better or more interesting or more healthy or more fun or more fulfilled.

2. Ask important questions.

Questions engage prospects and shoppers at a much higher rate than statements do. Questioning is a skill, and salespeople who possess the skill are worth their weight in gold.The quality and quantity of questions asked of a customer will help determine to what degree the shopper becomes engaged in conversation with us. Every salesperson should receive intensive sales training on the miracle of appropriate questioning.

3. Hold off on statements.

Telling is not selling. It is part of selling, but it is not selling. Yet, many salespeople view their role as that of being a "teller:" Telling about their store, telling about their sale, telling about how they work, telling about financing, telling about features of their product, etc.

To create engagement, we need to consciously hold off on telling early in the encounter in most cases. Unless what we have to say is stunningly interesting to our prospects (and it almost never is), it's probably all stuff they've heard before, and it serves as an anti-engagement tactic rather than a path to engagement.

* * * * *

Put an end to trite retail selling! Enter a new sphere of sales excellence. Engage your prospects!

If you like this post (or don't) please leave a comment.Skip Anderson is the Founder and President of Selling to Consumers Sales Training. He works with companies that sell to consumers in all B2C sectors to increase sales by realizing the buying potential of every prospect.

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Comments

[Bmarcos]

Thanks for your post, it's very interesting. But, maybe as a "customer of your blog", I was also waiting for a possible "right dialogue" between salesperson and customer, apart from the explanation about what to do. ;) Thanks!

[Sunoj]

You have written a very information blog on how to get your message across to a potential customer, simply yet effectively. Thank you so much for this piece for there are not many websites that touch on this topic. I can use this material to train my sales people. You will find more marketing information and tips here: www.karmiccoach.com and www.mysticselling.com.

-Sunoj