HIGH-END SHOWROOM IN CALIFORNIA
SITUATION: This showroom is owned by an esteemed designer in California. He also had a furniture and textile line represented in the California showroom and representative showrooms across the country. They were open for seven years and had more than 50 lines, yet they were not profitable. A lot of the draw was the owner’s name, aesthetics, and extremely successful design firm. The lines reflected his beautiful aesthetics, and they continued to add lines that reflected his aesthetic. Some designers had clients that loved that aesthetic; however, we discovered many did not have the same clientele and wanted lines that reflected a different look. They also had no visibility in the contract/hospitality sector.
They hired Dialogue Consulting primarily for the course on sales and to teach their sellers to “close more sales.” After explaining to the President that this is not the inherent problem with sales and certainly not the problem with profitability, they hired Dialogue Consulting to grow sales and get the showroom into a profitable operation.
Results: We implemented new sales techniques using the 7 Core Principles to Optimize Sales and GUSTO system, a new showroom and vendor strategy resulting in increased sales and lower operating expenses, turning the showroom into profitability and stability in less than 2 years with increased sales of $3,000,000.00. during 2020 (COVID)
STRATEGY: We first gave the sales course to the entire staff to assess sales vs. effort. GUSTO was put in place, and sellers began to focus on growing strategic accounts. Those aligned best with the product lines and had enough ongoing business to support ongoing loyalty. This began an immediate increase in sales, and closing rates changed from less than 30% on average to more than 60% on average because of the GUSTO system.
We then started assessing all the lines they carried to ensure they all gave a high ROI. We measured how easy the vendor makes it to sell vs. income. We dropped more than 10 lines giving the sellers more time to work with vendors that were simple to sell strategically, which also resulted in more time to focus on selling instead of administrative work, which consisted of constant following up on quotes and orders.