Blog

Talk To Her

by Jolene Turner – American Salon (www.americansalon.com)

To amp up retail sales, one salon professional embraces the motto “tell, don’t sell.”

Lynn Glaze, owner of The Salon LLC in Pineville, LA and founder of MasterPeace Consulting Group, believes the key to a successful salon retail business is to first know your clients’ grooming habits and to approach customer communications with a “tell, don’t sell” approach. “Through research, we know that 99 percent of our guests at The Salon LLC use shampoo; 1 percent uses just a bar of soap,” Glaze says. “We also know our clients choose a shampoo based on their needs or likes.” By asking two simple questions, The Salon LLC maintains an 85 percent client ratio on shampoo business:

1. What shampoo are you currently using at home?
2. What prompted you to buy a certain brand?

Using the answers, Glaze and her team tell their individual clients why they think, as their stylists, they should purchase and use the shampoo lines sold at the shop, and exactly why gaining their business is important to them. “We tell and not sell to our guests,” Glaze says. “The great thing about this is when a guest is asked during a follow-up call ‘was your stylist helpful and informative about your shampoo needs?’ they’re always pleased to have been given the information. Even if they don’t make a purchase, we’ve done our job professionally; isn’t that why the guest comes to us in the first place, because we’re professionals?” —J.T.