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Selling accessories allows retailers to earn additional margins at a time when margins on CE products are thinning out, advises Chris Emerson, Alphason’s Chief Operating Officer.
Your shop is full of some of the sexiest and hottest products in the marketplace. Your sales staff are most probably bombarded with questions about digital switchover, 3D, SDTV, HDMI, 1080DP plus a lot more. So the opportunity for your staff to do some smart selling is second to none.
You may ask what smart selling is all about. Well, to put it into context let me take you to McDonalds and examine their ‘chips offer’.
You’re probably wondering what chips have to do with our industry. Well, if you’ve ever been to a McDonald’s and don’t know the price of the fries you have been subjected to smart selling. It’s simply selling accessories on the back of the main product – the hamburger in this case. And it’s a fact that 60% of meals sold at this highly successful fast food chain are sold with fries.
The petrol station is another emporium of smart selling. How many times have you filled up your car and then picked up some sweets, paper or other ‘accessory’ on the way to the till? Quite a few times I would imagine. The products or ‘accessories’ on display are exactly matched to the needs of the customers walking through the door. Smart selling again.
Ikea is another place where smart selling abounds. Visit a branch to buy one particular product and I guarantee you will come out with a whole heap of other items too (and even meatballs) before you reach the checkout.
And that brings me to our own industry. As independents you have a very receptive audience for smart selling. And this is an absolute bonus.
Consumers respect your advice and knowledge as independent electrical retailers.
To smart sell, don’t just sell a TV. Ensure your staff sell the stand to support it, the cables to enhance the picture and sound quality, and the screen cleaner for added protection. And that is where we are coming from with our Viewsmart initiative, which celebrated its second birthday in September.
Selling with Viewsmart
Viewsmart puts accessories in the spotlight by presenting them in an innovative, focused and consistent way. We offer specially designed carousels to display product in an attractive and eye-catching manner. We now have smaller carousels, which display special promotions, plus large wall-mounted frames where consumers can touch and feel brackets. And the message to the consumer couldn’t be clearer:
• Crisper vision and enhanced sound thanks to the high quality cable,
• Cleaner screens as a result of the cleaning fluid,
• Clutter free living room thanks to cable management.
Engaging your staff
We know smart selling works. We’ve proved it. More than three quarters of our customer base are now enjoying additional margin thanks to their successful take-up of Viewsmart. A lot are even doubling their sales of accessories. And we have new Viewsmart stockists coming on board every week.
Staff engagement or performance is, of course, key in this strategy.
Staff don’t ‘smart sell’ because they don’t want to. Most of the time it’s because they don’t know how to. And that is why Alphason decided to link up with retra’s training guru George Morton to provide special online training for sales staff.
I am not suggesting for one moment that online training replaces face-to-face training, but it can provide a focus and a measure for staff engagement. And I believe that when staff see things in very clear graphics it assists in driving the message home. And the beauty of our training is that it can be used in bite-size chunks.
We all know how difficult it is out there. Gone are the margins of even two or three years ago on TVs. That is why smart selling is so vital.
Adopt the ‘chips with everything’ approach now and watch those margins grow.
