Top Tips on how to sell more products
Welcome to Shortcuts Top Tips. Each month we will send out some top tips that are business focused and offer advice on what salons can do to improve their bottom lines. So sit back and read on...

Retailing stock is critical to a salons success. If you get good product sales it really can make the difference each month. So how do salons get great product sales? Below are some tips that can help salons sell more:

Do Your Homework — Have your manager go through the days appointments with the staff prior to opening and identify areas where service recommendations and referrals can take place to maximize the client booking and minimize down time. Part of this process is getting the stylists to go through the client cards of their day's appointments. They can identify what products have been used in the past and who has bought what product. They can use this knowledge to ask about their experiences with the products and suggesting complementary products. If you have Shortcuts simply print up your Client Profile Cards and all the client details will be listed for you.

Sampling in the Salon — Obtain samples of new products in the salon. This way you can pass them on to staff to get them to try the product themselves. After all how can stylists recommend a product they haven't tried? Stylists tend to recommend products they have used and this can hold sway with clients.

Touch, Taste and Talk — if the client never sees the product they won't buy it. So ensure the stylists place each product they use on the workstation in front of the client so they can touch the product. Get the stylists to tell them how great it smells and let them taste it with their noses! The stylist can briefly explain what they are doing with the product and how it benefits the client's hair! Which leads on to Don't Sell, Suggest!!

Don't Sell, Suggest — Let's face it most stylists hate “selling” products. So don't make them do it. Talk to them about suggesting products instead. Change the psyche so they feel less pressure to sell. All stylists are experts on their clients' hair, so they have the knowledge to suggest what products the client should be using. Ensure the stylists feel a sense of empowerment so they are confident in doing this. A great way to start this off is through role play in the salon, this will help give the stylists the confidence to become more prescriptive to their clients.

Make it Visual — When you go to the supermarket you might not walk down the sweet aisle but at the check out you still grab a Galaxy. The power of this visual merchandising is extremely powerful for impulse buys and even planned purchases!

Make Your Job Easier — How frustrating is it for stylists when they perform wonders with a client's hair and get it feeling and looking completely reinvigorated, only for the client to go home and then use totally unsuitable products on their hair. So the next time they visit they have to start from scratch again. Now if the client was using a professional product that suited their hair at home, it would make the stylists job that much easier managing great looking hair in the salon.

Darren Messias, Creative Director at salon chain Keith Hall, shares his top tip for selling more product!

Education is the way forward!

Over the past year we have invested time and money into retail training to improve our product sales. The biggest effect of this has been making the teams realise that if they are not talking to their clients about homecare products, they are failing to do their job properly.

Most of our clients have been thrilled that someone professional has taken the time to explain what the correct products are for their hair types, and how it will make looking after their hair so much simpler.

Once a client has purchased a professional product you tend to find they will not go back to the brand they were buying from the supermarket, which was self diagnosed wrongly, and in turn re-purchase from your salon.

To support the success we have had with the training, the 9 salons to have had the training have enjoyed a 32.3% improvement over a 4 month period, conversely the 10 salons that have not had the training only had a 2.79% improvement during the same period.

All this is made so simple to monitor via the Shortcuts system, once you have the retail history in the system to target set and compare salons and individuals alike.

Remember if you have Shortcuts Software you can look up your top ten most profitable products on one of the product reports so you can focus on selling your most profitable products!

Remember watch out for next month's top tip from Shortcuts!