Mastering the Art of Selling in Your Salon: Strategies for Success and Global Connections

Sit down and see what's going on with the Queen of Salons. Hair, beauty, and more successful tips for business owners. All on Build Your Salon. Hello, hello, hello my salon friend. Phil Jackson here, your Queen of Salons, here to help you on your journey to salon business success. How on earth are you? Achingly well, I hope. Special shout out this week to our listeners in Indianapolis. You've made it into the top five cities of people listening to my funny little podcast this week. And also a big shout out to a couple of countries who have made it into my top ten. Listeners in Belgium, listeners in Israel. Welcome to the family. You've bumped Canada into 11th position. I don't know what I've done to the Canadians to annoy them, but if you know someone in Canada, please feel free to share my nonsense with them this week. How have things been for you? We're marching towards May and I'm very excited about May because I'm taking some of my customers on my first ever overseas retreat, my salon owners retreat in beautiful Lanzarote. So we'll be heading out in a couple of weeks time. So I'm in that funny preparation stage where you have to get all your, you have to start synchronising all of your beauty appointments, you see. So yesterday was microneedling and not my favourite treatment to have done, I have to say. So I'm feeling a bit tight and a bit tender today, but glowing beautifully, I have to say. These things do build up over time, don't they? And yeah, I've synchronised all of my appointments now. So my Botox is nice and firm. And I've also been having, I don't know if I should use the brand name, but I've been using Profilo as well. I've had my second dose of Profilo. So I should be practically prepubescent by the time I land in beautiful Lanzarote. Anyway, that's not what we're here to talk about this week. Well, this week, what we're talking about is selling. And of course, in our business, that has two flavours. It's selling our services and selling our retail. And we've explored retail in quite a bit of detail in other episodes. And I'm still kind of, the jury's out for me on whether we actually need to be holding retail in salons or not.

Whether we go for that nice shiny new drop shipping model, which means we're not carrying huge amounts of stock. And then we get paid a commission when our products are sold and land on somebody's doorstep. The bit that leaves me a bit icky is that we are sharing, obviously, all of our customer details with these suppliers. And I just worry that one day they're going to try and snip us out of the picture. And you may well say, well, of course, that's not part of the T's and C's at the moment. They would never do that to us. But then it's not too many years ago, my darlings, when there was one particular skincare brand who promised they would never be available for retail sale outside salons. And it was a very much a professional prescription product. And then lo and behold, it started popping up in department stores and they lost lots of accounts. And there were some very miffed salon owners all around the world for it. So these things do shift and do change. And I think we just need to keep one eye on the fact that we might well be cut out of that picture in that drop shipping model. But that said, there are no guarantees in life. And I also think it would be a perfectly valid proposition to not be retailing salons at all. You could very well just say, actually, we're always going to recommend what's best for you rather than the range that we happen to be stocking at the time. So we're not going to be stocking retail again. And that's fine, too. But assuming that we're going to be selling at least something, I do think the first tip that I've got for you is to really, really work on your product knowledge. Now, the problem with product knowledge is that we tend to look at it as a very scientific process. So there are essentially three ways that we could sell a product. And this applies to services as well. The first is we can talk about the features. The second, we talk about the benefits. And most of the time, we're taught to salon benefits, which doesn't quite go far enough. And I should explain in just a second. But when we're learning our product knowledge, it tends to be very, very feature rich. It's about ingredients. It's about how we use something. It's about what it's actually doing to us on a cellular scientific level. And that's because most of these products, of course, were cooked up in a laboratory somewhere by a scientist. And so the scientist tells the sales team what's in these products. And the sales team comes and tells us. So it's taught to us in a very scientific way. The problem is most of our customers don't buy in a very scientific way. Some do, but not that many. So instead, we start talking about the benefits. And we've mentioned this in a previous episode, too.

But that's not going far enough either. When we're looking at product knowledge, I really want us to be looking at the emotional reasons somebody would buy a product or service and the emotional transformation. How is this product or service going to make me feel different? How is it going to make me feel better? How is it going to increase my status, make me feel better about myself, make my friends envious of what I've had done? How on earth is it going to shift my perception of myself and the way that I feel and look? So when we're looking at product knowledge, of course, the other thing to bear in mind, if you've got a team, is no one else on the team is going to take product knowledge as seriously as you do. So you might say, well, I've got years in the business. These products were an absolute generation now. I know them inside out. That's not a good enough excuse. Your team need to see you taking product knowledge seriously. And of course, these days, we've got all of these wonderful resources online. So there's no excuse for not brushing up on your product knowledge in a little bit of downtime. You get last minute cancellation. Don't let that time get swallowed up in just gossip. Let's actually use it to be polishing and refining our product knowledge. Also use your rep. Anytime we had new products that were being launched into the salon, part of the deal, part of me taking that opening deal, was that the rep had to come in and sell those products to my team to teach them the product features, the benefits, and we could talk about the transformation in a team meeting. There's something about them hearing it from someone else, which just increases retention a little bit. So use your rep. Use your team meetings. We would very often have a product-focused team meeting where everybody would choose one product, or sometimes I would allocate a product to people the week before, and they had to present that product to the rest of the team inside the meeting. So they'll be talking about how they use it, their favorite thing about it, how the transformation will be sold to their clients. And then if you've got a team of seven or eight people, then suddenly we've polished and refined our product knowledge on seven or eight different products. And any time we have a promotion which includes a particular product or service, go back over the product knowledge again. Even if it's something you only learned about last week, even if it's something you've been stocking for years and everybody knows, just go back over it again and reinforce so that absolutely everything is front of mind in case of a customer inquiry.

Now there's a process that we go through when we're putting together promotions and sales promotions. And you may have heard this little framework being touted out and about in the cyber world. And the process is called market message media. And it has to be approached in this order. And usually if you're reflecting on a promotional campaign or some kind of marketing activity and it hasn't landed, there will be a problem inside this market message media framework. So we start with market. That's knowing your audience. Now, lots of you, I hope, will have a perfect client avatar. And if that's something that you want more information on, then please ping me an email, phil at buildyoursalon.com. You know I love hearing from you. And we could maybe even do an episode on your perfect client avatar and how we put that together. I'm sure I've got a download somewhere too. If I have, I'll chuck it on the website under podcasts. But we have to go a bit further than that because we need the perfect client for this promotion. So the process should be we set a target for a promotion. So we might say, OK, we need to generate $4,000 in our promotional activity this month. Who are the best clients that would serve us to hit that target? Is it reengaging with lost clients? Is it trying to find new clients to come into the salon? Is it our existing clients that we're going to sell a new product or a new service to? So we don't just use our ideal customer avatar. We use an ideal customer avatar for this promotion. So we go even further. Then we can go into message. And message is basically building out that promotional campaign. So building out exactly what it is that we're going to sell and how we're going to be selling it. The point being that the way that you sell a product to one particular avatar will be slightly different or very different even to the way that you would sell it to somebody else. So the way that we sell a product or service to somebody who identifies as male might well be very different to the way that we sell the same product or the same service to somebody who identifies as female. And we need to make sure that that messaging is tailored. So when we talk about messaging not landing or tailoring the message, this is where things are going wrong. So we need to be identifying the market first. Then we know which notes to hit in that wonderful tune of sales to make sure that we're getting the result that we want.

Then we can jump into media. So we've decided what the message is. We know who we're going to reach, how and what we're going to be saying to them. Then we can decide the platform that we're going to be using. And where people go wrong very often is they jump straight into the message. They say, I want to do a promo on facials. When actually what we should have done is identified who the promotion is for. And then it might well be that a facial promotion is perfectly valid. It might not. It might be that we need to serve those customers in a slightly different way. Or people jump straight into media. I need to do more on social media. I need to do more on Instagram. I want to do an Instagram promotion. And it won't land, I promise you, because you haven't been through this market message media framework. My Salon Owners Retreat is a unique event where you get to create the agenda. This isn't a retreat of boring presentations in conference rooms without windows. The entire program is a mix of group coaching, mastermind sessions, and one-to-one coaching with me, your favorite salon coach. There's also time built in for implementation. Yes, you're going to leave the retreat having actually got some important work done on your business with our support. Our spring 2023 retreat is now sold out, but you can be the first to hear about the next Salon Owners Retreat and get the very best early bird pricing by heading to buildyoursalon.com and joining our wait list. I can't wait to see you on Salon Owners Retreat. Don't forget your speedos. Now we could talk about market message media for hours. I do geek out a little bit, and this is what we go through in one of my programs, Simple Salon Marketing. We go through this process when we're putting campaigns together every single quarter. But I want to now jump into just a few little hints and tips, things that have served me as a salesperson over the years. I don't profess to be a sales trainer. It's not something that I have huge programs on or I take salon teams through, but a few things that have helped me sell over the years. And the first one is to have some kind of system or process in place to follow up, because very often customers just need a bit of breathing space and a little bit of time to digest, particularly if it's something that's brand new to them.

It's a lot to take a customer from hearing about something for the first time to actually getting them to touch their card on your card reader. So sometimes we just need to follow up and sometimes they'll say things like, oh, I need to speak to my husband or give me a couple of days to think about it. And a lot of the time we're failing to follow up with these people. We're failing to we're actually leaving some money on the table because a lot of these people actually will turn into customers if we just had a process. So in a bigger organization that was doing lots and lots of sales, you would have something called a CRM, which is a customer relationship management bit of software, which keeps track of where you're up to with different customers and different leads to basically score them and show where it's useful for you to spend your time in order to close some sales. For us, though, just put a note on your calendar somewhere. You know, Betty said give her a call in a couple of days. Well, let's actually make sure we do call Betty in a couple of days just to see whether we can close that sale or whether Betty's got some more questions. I just feel that when we're putting campaigns together, when we're putting marketing together, we should do everything we can. Do whatever it takes to hit those targets. Don't let yourself off the hook quite so easily. And sometimes people are using that as an excuse to say no. They don't want to say no to you. So they say, oh, I need to speak to my husband and see what he says about it. But sometimes they genuinely do just need a little bit of thinking space. So let's make sure that we're following up with people. Apart from anything, it puts you in alignment. It means that you're acting in integrity. If you said you'll speak to someone in a couple of days, let's make sure we do it. The big difficulty with a lot of the selling that we do is to create some kind of urgency. Now, people see this as a bit of a tacky sales technique to put a deadline on it or a limited number of packages available, pushing people to make a decision and trying to make something sound like there is scarcity around it. And there's a very good reason for that. And it's not necessarily that we're pushing people to say yes. The truth is we're pushing people to make a decision. And this is the tricky thing because making decisions is actually a little bit taxing. And my gosh, you must have felt like this from time to time, darling, where you've just got decision fatigue. Being a grown up just feels like you're deciding things all the bloody time. And sometimes we want someone to just take over, make some decisions for us, delegate a little bit of our lives and the management of our lives for a short time so we can just take a break. And your customers are like that, too.

They're making decisions all the time. And the easy thing to do is go, I'll think about it. I'll think about it later. And then what a lot of people do, of course, myself included, I have this tendency which I have to rage against every single day, is that we kick stuff into the long grass so damn far that someone else can make the decision for us. So maybe that promotion isn't available anymore. We haven't had to then decide, you see. So what urgency does is just push people to either say, yes, I'm in or no, I'm not. And either is absolutely fine. So when we put deadlines on things or we put particular packages available and only have a certain number available, all we're trying to do is get people to decide if it's for them, get them to raise a hand and say, yes, I'm in. And that's quite hard for us because by definition, most of our products and services are available all the time, which is why I'm a big fan of putting particular bundles of products and services together in a unique way that they're not going to see again. So we have at the moment, where are we at the moment? Towards the end of April, we're getting ready for our get set for summer promotions. And get set for summer is a particular bundle of products and services which will only be available for a certain amount of time. Or there will only be a certain number available. And this is a campaign that we've used with lots of salons for lots of years now, actually. I think it's been running for about four years. And it gets a little bit stronger every year as we polish and refine that messaging from our market message media structure. And it just makes people take action here and now because this is only going to be available for a short time. Yes, those products and services will be available later in the year, but not in that combination and probably not at that very special price. So it just gets people to take action now, make a decision now rather than kicking it into the long grass. The easiest people to sell to are people that have bought from you before. To try and convince somebody to trust you for the first time takes a lot of effort, a lot of energy. Once people have made that purchasing decision and they've been relatively happy with that purchasing decision, which I'm sure they have been, darling, because you do such a wonderful job for your customers, of course. But once they've been happy once, it's relatively easy or certainly easier to sell to them a second time. And I've always had a slightly crass expression in my own salon. So please forgive me. I really don't think about people in this way. But I've always said, you know, once once we've actually managed to get her wallet open, let's make sure we're helping her empty it, shall we? The easiest way to increase the amount of money flowing through your till is upselling, cross selling, selling more to your existing customers.

Don't let those opportunities pass you by. So if you have some, let's say you've put a promotion together for a fantastic new facial or I'm in the mood for a peel at the moment or certainly will be next week. So maybe we're going to put together a promotion on peels. What we don't do is stop there. Once somebody is in that treatment room having that chemical peel service done, now's the time to sell her on our next promotion or upsell her. So these are the products that you're going to need to take home and they're on special for the duration of this promotion as well. So don't stop selling just because somebody's bought. In fact, that's the indicator that it's time to try and sell more. And we see this lots and lots with our online purchases, of course, is would you like to add this to the basket or your sale isn't quite confirmed? Click this button to add this to your order. So let's get into the habit of doing some of those things. And it might feel that we're just selling more and more and more and more and more. Actually, all we're doing is giving people opportunities. And that's all selling is really is connecting people with opportunities. You have the opportunity to also buy this today. Do you want it or not? Let's put the decision on them, put the ball back in their court. But upselling and cross selling to existing customers is going to be the easiest way to sell more. What would getting paid properly mean to you? A better lifestyle? Less financial worry? Being able to be present and improve your relationships with your loved ones? Maybe even a better night's sleep? I know these are scary times. But if you're continually living paycheck to paycheck, if you can't seem to get ahead financially, I feel your frustration. I have seen your pain. It's time to stop winging it. You know your salon business could be doing more. It's time to finally fix your fear of the figures. Take control and charge what you're worth. To step into the shoes of the well-paid professional salonpreneur you were always meant to be. And that's what my Get Paid Properly program is all about. I'll help you improve your relationship with money, understand the finances in your business, and I'll show you what you should be charging to the penny. All of that without overwhelm and without guesswork. For all of the details of Get Paid Properly and to sign up now, head to getpaidproperly.com. And with the exclusive discount code PODCAST, you can get an enormous £200 off your investment in the program as well.

Let's work together to make this the year you finally take control of the money in your salon business. I think one of the toughest things about selling is staying motivated because inevitably we're going to get lots of people say no. So how do we keep that level of motivation, keep that enthusiasm for selling to our customers? If we've been knocked back a few times, and it's very interesting to me that if you've got a team member who just struggles to sell anything at all, all they need is one sale earlier in the day to completely change their mindset and their fortunes as far as setting is concerned. Once you've got a yes, then suddenly the next customer miraculously seems to buy from you as well. It's because you've shifted, of course. It's because your attitude has shifted a little bit. And keeping that motivation is key to actually enjoying the sales process. And I think the first thing that we need to figure out is how we're going to measure the success. So how do we know when we're doing well? And the obvious way to do it, of course, is to measure the amount that we're selling in pounds or dollars, whatever it is that you're using. And euros as well. Well done, Ireland, for tuning in, by the way. I can see you in my top ten as well and a couple of listeners in Belgium and Germany. So welcome, welcome, welcome. Anyway, so we're going to measure our sales in whatever currency you're using and keep track of that on those glorious salon reports. And you know how much I love our salon software systems. But I do think we can have a bit more fun with it. You know, if you're doing a promotion with your team, why not have a little sticker chart in the kitchen or in your staff room? Why not have some little prizes for people achieving certain levels of sales? And that level of motivation needs to stay high. That level of enthusiasm needs to stay high. And this is why I tend to have quite short term promotions because keeping the enthusiasm, keeping the excitement for weeks and weeks and weeks at a time is actually really, really hard. Whereas I can stay excited and motivated and keep people buzzing for, say, seven to ten days for a short term promotion much more easily. So I do think short term promotions help keep that enthusiasm, too. And then we can have a little break and then move on to the next one.

The measures that we're looking at, not just in terms of dollars or euros or pounds, but also have a look at your average bill over time. And we want to see the average bill starting to climb. Now, bear in mind, the average bill will have a slight jump each time you review your prices, if your prices go up, which, of course, they should be particularly this year, darling. But also we want to see growth in that average bill over time. And that means we're doing a better job at the upselling and cross selling that I referenced earlier. So a couple of stats you need to keep track of as far as your management and performance management is concerned. But let's also try and have some fun along the way as well and put some little incentives together that will keep our team motivated. If you're a solopreneur, I always say that we should have some rewards built in as well. So when I'm setting the target for my promotion, I will also have what I call a triumph target. So a higher target over and above that. So, for example, we could say we're going to sell 20. We're going to upsell our clients 20 times this week to include peel into their facial services. Sorry, I'm obsessed with peel. I'm booked for next week. But if we can hit 25, that would be amazing. And with that 25 comes some kind of reward or some kind of treat. So even if you're on your own, please make sure you're building these treats into your triumph targets and deliver on them because we need all parts of your brain working in the same direction during promotion periods. And if we cop out a little bit, if we don't deliver on those rewards, the childish bit of our brain, the subconscious bit of our brain, that reptilian bit of our brain isn't going to get on board next time round. So we talk ourselves out of things. We say, yes, we hit 25. But that's only because Auntie Nelly came in. She's not a proper customer because she doesn't pay full price. So we're not going to include her in the targets. We talk ourselves back out of these rewards. You must deliver on them because next time round, we want our enthusiasm to be very high, too. And finally, I want you to have a lighter touch as far as rejection is concerned. Trust me, darling, rejection is something that as a middle aged gay man, you get very used to. I promise. But I want you to when you're when you're thinking about selling, I want you to tap into the McDonald's mode of thinking. And so, for example, let's say you're working in a restaurant, not in McDonald's. Let's say you're working as a server, as a waiter in a restaurant. And part of your job is to take the dessert cart around. I don't even know if they do that anymore.

The restaurants that I used to work into, we used to have a dessert trolley, a dessert cart that we used to wheel round and tempt people at the end of the meal and serve from the cart. I don't think I've seen that for quite a long time now, but perhaps I'm not going to nice restaurants. That's the curse of having bloody kids, isn't it? We end up in awful restaurants. Anywho, the part of my job was to sell these desserts. Now, if I offered a dessert and somebody said yes, that was fine. If somebody said no, that was fine, too. Sometimes they want dessert. Sometimes they don't. What I don't do is go out to the kitchen. And so I'm not selling desserts anymore. This is a complete waste of my time. It's really demotivated me and ruined my day. And it's the same in McDonald's. When McDonald's offer you, in fact, we don't even speak to servers anymore in McDonald's, do we, for goodness sake? Everything's done on touch screen. But it used to be that part of an employee's job when they were serving you in McDonald's was to ask if you want fries with that. So if you ordered a sandwich or a burger, they would say, do you want to turn that into a meal? Do you want fries with that? Now, what the McDonald's employee doesn't do is say, well, I'm never offering fries again because I've had three no's in a row and I'm really demotivated about this now. It's just part of the job. And that's how we need to be with our sales. So, yes, we want to connect people with our products and services. Yes, we want to make sure that we're selling them on not only on the features and benefits, but that emotional transformation. Yes, we want to make sure that our messaging is absolutely singing with all the right signals for our customers. But if they don't take it, it doesn't mean anything about the product. It doesn't mean anything about the service. It doesn't mean anything about the client. It certainly doesn't mean anything about you. It just means they didn't want it this time around. So this is the lighter touch attitude that I'm talking about. This is where I need us to be when we're selling, upselling and cross selling. So what have I missed? Reach out. Let me know. Have you got any sales tips you'd like me to share with the big wide world with all these wonderful people tuning in from cities I've never heard of and places that I would probably never get invited to visit. But please feel free. If I'm missing something, though, reach out. Phil at buildyoursalon.com. You know, I love hearing from people who are facing similar problems in different locations around the world. It honestly makes my day. If you haven't got time for that, maybe take 30 seconds just to leave me a five star review on this podcast.

Maybe think about sharing the episode. But I read all the reviews, I promise you. And when I see five stars, oh, my goodness, it absolutely makes my week, darling. I am terribly easily pleased. Just seven short days until I'm coming in your ears again. And until then, take care. Sit down and see what's going on with the queen of salons. Hair, beauty and more successful tips for business owners. All on build your salon.