|
Also in this issue...
01 |
02 |
03 |
04 |
05 |
06 |
07 |
08 |
09 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 |
Featured Companies
|
|
|
Forget the Customer—Focus on the Cart
| Judy Sharpton
|
 
|
|
|
>> Published Date: 4/25/2012
|
|
|
 In last month’s column I encouraged you to organize two key departments to maximize add-on sales: “Do You Need?” and Container Gardening. In a continuing effort to encourage you to make the store work harder so staff won’t have to, I ask you to take a long-standing garden center adage about customer service and turn it on its head. Let’s take the concept of on-the-sales-floor customer service based on interacting with customers personally and refocus our attention on the customer’s cart as the point of interaction. NOTE: If your store does not allow for shopping with carts, fix that! Nothing increases sales like a cart. Only three issues preclude carts: aisle width, walking surface and budget.
So, what about cart focus over customer focus? No store has enough salespeople to interact with every customer. Too often, staff-customer interactions turn into a store tour, not added sales. Many staff people can sell up, but the best ones don’t get involved with a personal shopping experience. These competitive sellers are already focusing on the cart.
Here’s how several scenarios play out:
• The customer strolls in the store without a cart. Say hello and offer one.
• The customer has a cart loaded with annuals, perennials, shrubs, a birdbath or a mix of all three. Prepare every staff member to offer the customer every additional product to make that collection successful. Brainstorm with staff to create a store-wide cheat sheet that can be tucked into a pocket or apron like the flight attendant prompt card used at the beginning of every flight. This makes the process consistent and recognizes the highest-margin products. At a brainstorming I attended recently, a storeowner emphatically stated that every shrub needs Preen. That means every staff person recommends Preen. Staff who disagree with that recommendation better speak up at the meeting or be prepared to support the program. On the sales floor, staff can evaluate a cart, say hello and offer specific suggestions, like Preen.
• A couple strolls the store. After they’ve been greeted several times by several staff members, one of them says “We have this area in our yard that we want to plant.” This sentence is often accompanied by a circle gesture indicating some concept of space. The staff person says, “Did you want to do this project today?” If yes, staff responds with, “Let’s get a cart.” Only then does the staff person begin to ask questions about color, sun or shade and, of course, budget. If the initial answer is “No, we’d just like to get some ideas,” staff then directs the couple to the store’s DIY Gardening Kit that allows them to doodle and return with some ideas. The staff person directs the customer to either shade gardening or sun gardening options. This exchange may also reveal the project to be larger than gardening, involving hardscaping or other landscape products. The staff person can then direct the customer to a source for service, either offered by the store or by someone the store recommends.
You will note all of these options require the store to have a DIY Gardening Kit, some delineation based on sun and shade, a landscape department or a list of landscapers to recommend. Ahhh! The joy of planning.
With eyes trained on the cart and a recommendation list in a pocket, staff can work the floor looking for sales, not conducting tours. Will there still need to be hand holding for customers? Yes. But hand holding starts after cart holding.
To help the person make these cart-based sales, the store should create hot spots of each product on the list at the location where the customer makes the connection. That means the required Preen for shrubs should be on a display in the shrub department as well as in the amendments department and probably in the “Do You Need?” department adjacent to the register. Create consistent signage for each of these displays with words like “For Success, We Suggest” or “Staff Recommends.” These could be whiteboard signs that are easily changeable, but make sure one person writes all the signs. Don’t blow the consistency now!
Cart over customer—just a better focus on turns, not tours! GP
Judy Sharpton, LEED Green Associate and member of ARCSA, is a garden center design and renovation specialist with 35 years experience in advertising and promotion, and is the owner of Growing Places Marketing.
|
|
© Copyright 2001 - 2013 Ball Publishing —
|
|
|
|
|