44 April 2010
Sales Guru By Gene Fresco Preparation is the second “P” of the eight “Ps” of selling. Planning, PREPARATION, Prospecting, Pre-approach, Presentation, Persistence, Perpetuation and Profitability. How do you prepare to make a sale? Let’s talk about your store. Is it ready to make a sale? Are all the instruments cleaned, tuned and ready to play? Do the guitars have all their strings? Are the drumsets set up properly and the heads tuned? Does the cash register have enough money in it to make change? Are you prepared? Are you neatly dressed? Do you have a pen? Are you in a cheerful mood? Is there a smile on you face? Have you made any appointments to see your favorite clients today—in the store or at their church or club or office? Let me give you some good advice. Keep a notebook on your desk and write everything down. Don’t depend on your memory. I have a page or pages for every day of the year, and I refer to it constantly. I make sure I haven’t forgotten something or somebody. One of the most successful music dealers I know has desks for every one of his salespeople, so they have their personal work space. They have their own phone and a place for them to close their sales. What else can you do to be prepared? Learn all you can about the products you sell. Read catalogs, product spec sheets, the endorsees that play these products, guarantees and availability. Read sales training books to improve your knowledge of sales techniques. I have read more than 500 sales training books and they have taken me from clerk to professional salesman. BE PREPARED… A Boy Scout’s Motto Planning, PREPARATION, Prospecting, Pp P Pre-approach, Presentation, Persistence, Perpetuation and Profitability. p p Don’t be a “May I help you” sales clerk. Be a professional salesman. Have a briefcase and have contracts and credit applications in it. If you are going to a church to sell them a sound system, have literature and spec sheets of the equipment you plan on selling them. If you are going to demonstrate amps to a band, make sure the amps are working perfectly and you have cables handy to plug them in. Always have business cards with you. Make sure you give one to everyone you meet. Post them on bulletin boards at your barber shop, laundromat, church, restaurant, club or anywhere there is a bulletin board to put it on. You have to know more about your business—the products you sell—than the customer. If you don’t, you won’t control the customer; the customer will control you. I recommend you don’t put prices on your products. Put a code number on every product. Have you ever noticed when you pick up a piece of jewelry, a ring or a watch in a jewelry store and it has a number that can’t possibly be the price? It might say 609450 on it. Huh? That can’t be the price. What it means is it was bought in June 2009 and wholesale cost is $450. That’s their code. Make a code of your own. If you put the sales price on an instrument, the customer could walk out, go to your competitor and say, “I saw it at Joe’s <strong>Music</strong> for $898. I will buy it from you if you let me have it for $798.” Bummer, huh? You don’t know if the customer has a trade in, or wants to pay by cash, credit card or layaway. You have to know all the factors before you quote a price. That is one thing that you know that the customer doesn’t, and he has to come to you and ask you. Excellent preparation will get excellent results. It’s April. Are you accomplishing your goals? Goals are part of preparation. You have to prepare the steps that will help you accomplish your goals. Let’s say one of your goals for the year is selling $200,000 worth of electric guitars. In 50 weeks, that would be $4,000 a week. Five days a week, that’s $800 a day. That could be two $400 guitars, four $200 guitars or one $800 guitar per day. The preparation to this is to have an adequate amount of guitars on hooks at all times to accomplish your goal. Weekly, you should check to see that you p P order replacement guitars for the ones that were sold. If you are falling behind on your goal, you could advertise a “Guitar Sale” to ensure you will make your goal. You should get all your salespeople to participate, maybe offering a spiff weekly for the best guitar salesperson. You can use this in every department in your store: pianos, drums, guitars and everything else. Remember, there are three kinds of people. Those who say, “What’s going to happen?” Those who say, “What happened?” And those who “Make it happen.” You can be the third kind with excellent preparation. Probably the most important “Preparation” is in your mind. You must prepare yourself to have a positive attitude in all you do, and especially in sales. I have said selling is 90 percent attitude. Prepare yourself to succeed and you will succeed. You might or might not have been a Boy Scout, but let your motto be “BE PREPARED.” I wish you good selling. Gene Fresco is waiting to hear about what topics you want covered in his Sales Guru column. Send all comments and suggestions to Brian Berk at bberk@testa.com and he will forward them directly to Gene. <strong>Music</strong> & <strong>Sound</strong> <strong>Retailer</strong> 45