I read a lot of blogs and listen in on a lot of Kitchen and Bath group discussions – on LinkedIn and elsewhere. And I get disheartened at the sheer magnitude of bad recommendations and advice on how to sell kitchens in this market.
Close, Close, close that deal. Ask for the order. You have to be aggressive in this market. You can’t take no for an answer and a customer who wants to think about it just needs to be pressured into acting now. If you let them walk out of that showroom, the deal is lost.
Sound familiar?
And I can’t figure out where it’s coming from. Because if I could figure out, I’d like to take some A/C duct tape (the kind that takes forever to scrape off) and use it to stop the spread of all this crazy Cabinet Industry spam.
I mean all you have to do is reread the second paragraph of this post and imagine how you would feel if someone was acting this way towards you. You would leave and never come back. You would tell the story to your friends and family. You would tell them “I’m not stupid, I know what they were trying to do. They clearly didn’t have my best interest in mind.”
So why then do kitchen designers buy into these used car sales techniques? I don’t think I’ll ever get the answer to this. But here’s the top 10 ways to spot when you’re acting like the guy in the picture.
Top 10 Ways to Know You’re Acting Like the Guy on the Lot
- You tried to pressure a prospect to make a decision before they were ready.
- You get angry or frustrated with prospects when they price shop you or don’t choose you.
- You can’t name the last sales book you read on your own time.
- You used the phrase “act now”, or compared yourself to a lawyer, accountant or other “professional” unrelated to your industry in front of a prospect.
- You think that because you’ve been doing your process for X years, that makes it optimal (no process is optimal for that long – things change faster than that).
- You insist on charging some sort of fee before the customer has actually decided you’re the one.
- When someone asks you to describe your sales process, you look at them like they must be smoking something.
- You steered a prospect towards a particular brand because of a SPIF a manufacturer offered.
- You think that moving $2M+ per year is a pipe dream and anyone selling that much must either be really “lucky” or somehow cheating the system.
- When a prospect gets hesitant, you get aggressive.
If any part of this list made you frustrated or angry, good. That means were getting some good discussion going. And it’s about time this Industry had a bit of a wake up call. Prospects aren’t stupid. They’re actually some of the brightest people you’ll meet. And they pick up on garbage techniques like this all day long.
So if you know who it is who is recommending these used car sales techniques, we’d like to add him to the Cabinet Industry’s Most Wanted List. He’d be the #2 on that list.
Why?
Because #1 still goes to the person who originally dreamed up charging a design fee.
