How to Actually Sell Retail in Your Salon (When You Hate Being Salesy)

Most salon owners fail to hit their profit targets, and yet most also leave thousands of pounds on the table every year because they hate selling retail. I get it, nobody wants to be the pushy salesperson, but not recommending products is actually doing your clients a disservice. Let me explain. Hello, hello, hello, my salon friends. Phil Jackson here, your queen of salons, coming all over the airwaves with another dose of my Wise Owl Wisdom. How on earth are you? Achingly well, I hope, as we're nearly at the end of January. How's it been for you? Have you been good? Have you been hitting your targets? Come on, there's a few more days left in the month. You know you can hustle just a little bit harder. And maybe a bit of that hustling is around retail. And I'm not a hustle coach. I'm not a 10X coach. I'm not somebody who wants you to be pushy and salesy. But we need to acknowledge that most salon owners hate selling retail. Problem is, if you've got a team and you hate selling retail, your team ain't going to retail either. Why do we have this aversion to it? Why do we have this problem with retailing? Well, I think we feel that we're being pushy. And we don't want to be that person who's trying to push more stuff onto people that they just don't need. You got into this industry to make people feel good, not to flog another bottle of cleanser. Maybe you've experienced bad retail yourself. Perhaps you've been to places where products are being aggressively pushed. Perhaps you felt uncomfortable around particular sales assistants that follow you around squirting perfume into your eye in department stores. You don't want to be that person. You don't want to be the guy at the garage who's trying to flog you. All of the extras that go with that shiny new car. But honestly, the biggest reason people don't retail is they have a fear of rejection. What if the customer says no? What if they think you're just trying to make more money? What if you look greedy? It's not usually because you don't believe in the products. You chose your products very well. If you don't like your products, that's something for your New Year's resolutions for 2026 to get sorted. But you don't want people to think less of you. So what are we going to do about it? Well, we need to shift our mindset a little bit. And we need to see that this is shifting your mindset around your service. Stop thinking of retail as selling products. Start to think of it as doing a better job.

You're a professional. You need to do a professional job. Can you imagine someone coming into the salon, let's say for a facial treatment, and you know that there's a service or a treatment that you offer that will get them better results more quickly and longer term results as well. And you choose not to sell that service to your customer. You choose not to tell the customer and give them the option to have that better treatment come off it. You wouldn't do it. And yet we do that with retail products day after day after day. Products that will give them better results. Products that will speed up their results. That will maintain their colour or their skin or whatever much more effectively. And we choose not to make that recommendation. Honestly, I think you're doing a massive disservice. And I think it comes down to you being a bit selfish about your feelings around rejection and your fears when you should be thinking about what's best for the customer instead. You need to prescribe the right home care to look after the work that you're doing in the salon. We're not just saying, oh, we've got some great products if we're interested. We're saying very specifically we're prescribing the best thing that will look after their skin, get them the results, prevent colour fade, make sure their treatment lasts, and so on and so on. That's not being salesy. That's being professional. So let's be tactical about it because not all retail strategies will work. Relying on beautiful product displays is not going to work. It's important that your product displays look nice and certainly clean. My God, you hair guys are brilliant at having dusty, hairy shelves and wondering why people won't pick up a product. Don't mention products vaguely. We need some very specific recommendations in there. Also, don't wait until the checkout. Now, by the time they're at the checkout, they're mentally done. They just want to leave. They're worried they've only got three minutes left on their car parking. The moment to recommend has passed. Bring it forward. Bring it into the consultation. Bring it into the beginning of the appointment. Now, this is what my husband is amazing at.

And I've been trying to get him to write a retail course for years now. And it's really irritated me that he won't do it. But he's very good at connecting to their specific problem, but doing it in the consultation. So what he'll say is he's a hairdresser, but you can translate if you're a beauty therapist. What he'll say is, yes, we can certainly look at creating that style for you or creating that colour for you. These are the products you're going to need to make sure that you can recreate that at home. These are the products that are going to look after that colour. Is that OK before we get started? Because if not, we need something that's going to be easier for you to maintain, less taxing on the products. If you want that style, these are the products you're going to need. And he gets the agreement before he's even picked up a comb. Make sure you've got the products to show people. Make sure you've got the products in stock, darlings. I know it's an obvious thing, but the number of salons that I go into where someone actually can be bothered to make the effort to retail and then go to the shelves to find that product's not available, for goodness sake. If it's not available, take it away for shop use as well. Find an alternative. And also give your team a little bit of leeway. If you've got a customer who could really do with three products, but they're saying that budget is a problem and they've only got enough money for two of those products, give your team a little bit of leeway to say, do you know what, if you take all three, we can give you the third product, half price. Spell out those criteria. Spell out what they're able to do to encourage people to buy. So the complete framework is during the service, be planting the seeds, ideally in the consultation. Explain how we're using the product. When we get towards the end of the appointment and we're finishing up, not at the checkout, reinforce, make sure they understand the prescription that you're giving them. If you need a little prompt, by the way, we used to be a Bumble and Bumble salon and Bumble and Bumble were brilliant. They had consultation pads so we could actually fill stuff out. But don't do what all the spas do, which is put three ticks in boxes, give them the piece of paper and send them on their way. Actually give them clear instructions on what they're using, how often, and the consequence of not using that product as well. Make it easy to say yes. Physically picking up the products helps. If you've got a really big problem with retail, price it in. If you know, so we used to do this with hair extensions, but again, if you're a beauty therapist, you can translate. If you do a set of hair extensions and use the wrong products on them, things are going to go wrong really quickly

and it's going to cost you a lot of money to get that sorted out as well when it comes to your next maintenance. So we used to price the products in. If you bought extensions from me, the products were included. Now, what have you got that's the equivalent of that? I'm sure there's something on your price card. We used to do the same thing with colour correction. If I've spent all afternoon fixing up a colour because you fucked it up at home and turned it green, and then you go home and use crappy shampoos and conditioners, things are going to unravel really quickly. You're going to be back in the salon paying hundreds and hundreds for me to fix it all over again. Price it in. And it will also break the habit. If you've got very low retail, we used to do this a lot. If we saw salons that were selling, you know, zero or one products a week, we used to start pricing stuff in just to get us off the ground, just to get a little bit of momentum happening with retail. Yes, sometimes people are going to decline. Sometimes they're going to say no. Sometimes they're going to have objections. Make sure you handle those really professionally, but don't take it personally. Do you think when somebody asks you whether you want fries with it in McDonald's, if you say no, do you think they take that personally? No, they just get on with the next customer. And that's the attitude that you need as well. Look at some storytelling. Build some stories. Have some success stories using those products that you can share with your customers. Stories sell every time. Have a look at the episode that I did with my friend Akin quite a long time ago now, talking about storytelling as part of the retail journey. Super effective when you can get it right. So let's stop thinking of retail as selling. Don't sugarcoat it, though. This is ultimately what we want is to sell more products. But we want to sell more products by prescribing, by doing the job we're supposed to do, by doing the professional job and not doing the client a disservice. What have I missed? I would love to hear what you're doing to retail effectively in your salon. I used to say this was optional. I used to say it was OK to choose not to retail at all. Those days are gone, my friend. It's a profit opportunity that we can't afford to decline. Reach out. Let me know. Phil at buildyoursalon.com. I'd love to be sharing your retail story with my Build Your Salon audience. They're amazing, guys, and I'm sure you could be a huge inspiration to them. In the description below is a link to my Salon Spark program. Head over to buildyoursalon.com or salon-spark.com. Got to do something about that hyphen in 2026. It's my accountability program that helps keep you on track with the stuff that you know you should be doing. A gentle nudge, a gentle kick up the arse every week from your Uncle Phil on a Friday morning.

Just a few short days until I'm coming all over the airwaves again with another dose of my Wise Owl wisdom. And until then, take care.