How to improve salon retail - if you're starting with ZERO!

Hello, Phil Jackson from Build Your Salon here, helping you with the tools you need to master to build the salon business you deserve. And today, let's talk about retail. What do you do when you're literally starting with zero sales? Welcome, and today I would like to help you with your retail sales. More specifically, I want to share a two-part strategy with you, particularly apt if your retail sales are zero or close to zero. What's prompted this is I've just got off the phone with one of my coaching clients, and she's really struggling with retail performance. And I've seen this twice before in my coaching career as well. So, three times I've applied this two-part strategy, and three times, I hope, it's going to yield excellent results. So, I thought it was about time I put it down on a recording and shared the strategy with you. Now, before we carry on, I have to preempt this with a couple of the measures that my client has already taken. So, first of all, she's made sure her staff has adequate product knowledge. She's brought the manufacturers into the salon to talk through the products and make sure her team is comfortable. So, the reason they're not selling is not because they don't understand the products. And secondly, she's given them some tips and techniques on sales. She's given them some openers for conversation. She's helped them look for cues to start recommending products. So, they've had product knowledge training, they've had some retail technique training, and they're still not performing because they're just out of the habit. Very often, we encounter resistance from our therapists or from our stylists. They feel that it's not their job to sell, they are there to either create amazing hair or to look after your customers. But we know, as salon owners and managers, that not only can retail sales really position you as a professional in the industry, but they can be a really strong source, a useful source of profit for the salon as well. So, what do we do? How do we go about it? Well, the first strategy is not for those who aren't feeling brave. And I tried this strategy first of all in my own salon because I wasn't sure how it was going to go down. I made a promise, a public promise, to my customers. So, my own hair salon here in the south of England is a hair salon.

It's been open for about 18 years now, and our retail sales, until a few years ago, were not the best, to be honest. So, what I did was have some cards printed, and I put a card on each section. So, on each mirror in front of the client. And the card said that if we didn't tell you about every single product we were using on your hair today, you would get to take the whole lot home for nothing. What that meant was that there was no embarrassment around that sales conversation. The customer knew that it had to happen at some stage. They were waiting for that recommendation to come their way. And the staff didn't have a choice anymore. I'd taken that choice away from them. It's a very bold move, but it literally changed our retail strategy and our retail sales overnight. Because every single client was consistently being told what was right for their hair. If that doesn't appeal to you, how about the second part of this strategy? And you don't need to do both parts to get some results. If you're really struggling, if your sales are next to nothing, hold a full staff meeting. Get everybody in the room and put this to them. If you can imagine a reasonable day. I'm not talking a jam packed Saturday where a stylist is doing maybe 10 or 11 clients in a day. But a really steady, a good strong Thursday or a Friday. So let's say they're seeing 7 or 8 clients in a day. Put it to your team. Ask them, if you were doing a really professional job, a full service, how many, as a minimum, do you think you could turn into retail clients? Out of that 8, what would be the bare minimum that would be a good result for the day? And they might come up with something silly like 7 or 8. So they're saying that they should be selling to every customer, which isn't realistic. You're going to have to manage that expectation down. And I would settle on anything they give you below about 3 or 2. Even if they say one client a day, the bare minimum would be one retail client per day if you were doing a good job and talking consistently to your clients. What they've done is helped you set a minimum acceptable standard in your salon for retail sales.

Now that may not sound like a lot, but if you're coming from a place where you've got zero sales, and I'm talking absolutely zero, all of a sudden every member of your team selling one product a day will make a huge difference to your retail turnover and your profitability. And bear in mind this is just the minimum. I would also take the opportunity in that meeting to ask them what excellent looks like. What would show that they were doing a really amazing job on retail? If they were selling say 5 or 6 products a day, get that standard written down as well. And if anybody ever hits that level of excellence, celebrate it. Celebrate it publicly in your team meetings, on your Facebook page, but absolutely make sure that extra is recognised. So, two pronged approach. The first, not for the faint hearted. The second, I absolutely recommend in every salon that I work with. I hope that's been useful to you. If you get some good results, please head over to the Build Your Salon Facebook page and share your results. I love hearing about how well my salon owners and managers are doing. If you haven't subscribed already, hit subscribe now. I do a broadcast like this every week and I would hate you to miss out on the content that I've got for you. If you've already subscribed, I will speak to you next week. Take care.