ENSEMBLE SELLING
Sales of living room merchandise fall into two classes: Piece sales, involving the selection of one or more pieces for use in a room already partially furnished; and ensemble sales, involving the selection of most or all of the furnishings necessary to equip completely a room, or even a house.
These two types of sales present different problems and require the use of different methods. However, they are alike in two important respects. In all of them the self-interest of the buyer is the determining factor; and competition in one or more forms is inevitable.
THREE FORMS OF COMPETITION
The first and inescapable form of competition is a competition among conflicting desires in the mind of the average buyer. In order to buy one thing, she must give up something else. Furniture dealers and salesmen habitually assume that the woman who enters a furniture store and asks, for example, for an easy chair, has already decided to buy one. The fact is that the customer is often merely weighing the satisfactions likely to come to her through possession of a chair against those offered by other articles or services also under consideration. In this case you must lead her to desire a chair more than she desires anything else before you can sell any chair, however large your stock or low your prices.
Unhappily, much furniture advertising is calculated to give the reading public a false impression of the necessary price levels of good furniture. It may be that you can please your customer with a chair at the price she has tentatively decided to pay. If not, you must please her in a more costly piece. Here you run up against new competition; for however able your demonstration of quality may be, your customer is certain to weigh that additional item of cost against the additional articles that she must give up in order to buy the chair. Hence something more than a convincing demonstration of the intrinsic worthiness of the piece will be necessary to complete the sale.
Finally, there is a third form of competition—that among different furniture stores for the same sale. However well the customer may like your chair at the price asked, it is natural for her to try to find something just as good at a lower price, or more pleasing at the same price, since that is her habit in buying other commodities.
She knows that there are other good stores nearby, with scores of easy chairs to show her, and that they are advertising bargains and holding out inducements to get her trade. You cannot prove to her in advance that she will only waste her time by looking further, and any arguments, pleadings, or high-pressure methods designed to keep her from doing so are quite likely to have precisely the opposite effect.
WHAT SHOPPERS REALLY WANT
At this point a surprisingly large percentage of salesmen weaken. Knowing that it is impossible to oppose successfully the self-interest of the buyer, they can think of nothing else to do. In point of fact there is nothing else to do in a great many cases, except to make every possible effort to create an impression sufficiently powerful to bring the buyer back after her shopping tour is over. In many other cases, however, there is a way to meet competition, if you can develop the ability to use it.
The woman who wants an easy chair, a sofa, a rug, or a desk, also wants something else which is far more important to her, namely, a more satisfying room. She doesn't tell you about it, but she really hopes that the new piece under consideration will add more beauty, comfort, distinction, or impressiveness to her room.
Get her to thinking of her room as a whole, with the new article a part of that whole. Lead her to believe that the desirable qualities which she seeks will appear in it as a result of your help in selection and arrangement. In other words, appeal to her self-interest by offering her something highly important which she knows in advance cannot be found elsewhere.
THE "ROOM PICTURE" METHOD
To overcome the inevitable competition of opposing desires, and to reduce or eliminate shopping for variety of selection or price, make your customer see the piece under consideration not as an individual unit, but as an integral part of her room. As long as she is permitted to think that she is buying a chair and nothing but a chair, she will be concerned with a multitude of details, most of which are of no real importance,[27] and will be strongly disposed to keep on looking until she has exhausted every possibility of finding something completely satisfactory in all of these details.
Transfer her interest to her room as a whole, with your chair as a part of it, and you immediately rob most of these details of their earlier importance in her mind. Paint a sufficiently attractive mental picture of her room as it will become with your chair in it, and she may buy the picture, and the chair as an essential element of it. She will not care to shop further for a better looking or cheaper chair, in the fear that even if one could be found the picture would be spoiled.
THE SHIFT FROM UNIT TO ENTIRE ROOM
Possibly you have had the experience of losing important sales to men working in stores far smaller than your own or to decorators with no more physical equipment than could be condensed into a small office or studio. Why should you have lost such sales when you enjoy the great advantages of ample stocks, lower prices, better terms, and the prestige of a well-known and financially solid house? Obviously, because the other man had the skill and the power to shift your customer's interest and desire from merchandise, as such to what merchandise will do.
In order to make a normal sale by means of this "room-picture" method, you will require:
1. Full knowledge of your own merchandise from the technical and artistic aspects.
2. Considerable knowledge of the customer's room and its important elements.
3. Adequate knowledge of decorative principles, including the emotional values of light, color, texture, line, and proportion.
4. A little knowledge of the decorative accessories—pictures, potteries, glass, embroideries, and the many small things necessary to save a room from bareness, and to give it color, snap, and intimacy.
It is desirable but by no means necessary that you have these accessories for sale; however, you must know how to talk about them, because it is impossible to make a living room genuinely attractive and satisfying without them.
WHY CUSTOMERS ARE DISAPPOINTED
Few furniture men appreciate the extent to which sales volume is restricted by insistence upon selling parts instead of finished products. Not only is furniture displayed as a pharmacist displays drugs in the rows of bottles on his shelves; but also customers are asked to do their own compounding and to accept full responsibility for the results.
Many salesmen habitually assure the buyer that her room will be comfortable and beautiful after they have placed in it a sofa, two chairs, an end table, one floor lamp, and a radio. Of course it isn't, and disappointment results. She sees her room as bare, thin, spotty, unhomelike, and unlovely. She knows something is wrong, but she is without knowledge to correct it.
Ensemble selling and complete room settings are the home-furnishings industry's modern answer. Unless she is able to arrange the major pieces of her furniture in a manner that will show them to the best advantage, unless she has at least the requisites in the smaller pieces, lamps, and other accessories, she may never get the full satisfaction that she should for the money she has spent in the furniture store. It is the salesperson's duty to fit his customer's purchases into a complete room or home.
NATURALNESS ESSENTIAL IN ENSEMBLE SELLING
In ensemble selling, don't lecture, talk about yourself, or appear in any way to be airing your knowledge. Simply talk in an off-hand manner, as if you were dealing in commonplaces as familiar to your customer as to yourself. The important matter is to learn promptly enough about her room to enable you to link some of its characteristics with the characteristics of your merchandise, so that as you point out the many desirable features of her room, and the perfect way in which your furniture harmonizes with and emphasizes these features, she is brought to the conviction that she should have the room just as you have pictured it, and therefore must have your furniture, without regard to what other stores may have to offer.
This method is not too easy when one first begins to employ it, nor should it be used with every customer. It will interest a surprisingly large percentage of customers, and it often will result in a sale in situations where all other methods fail. It is planned selling, which, based on the enlightened self-interest of the buyer, helps her to buy, and so smoothes the path before her that she may purchase her needs room by room.
SELLING THE COMPLETE ROOM OR COMPLETE HOUSE ENSEMBLE
Many important sales will involve the complete room ensemble or the complete house ensemble both of which are used to the great advantage of the store and of the public. Usually such sales are in sight long enough in advance to permit you to study and measure the rooms. In important sales of this kind, try to get the head of the house in for the first showing. You will probably be unable to close the sale without him, and he will be likely to save your time as well as to increase the amount of the sale. Do not overlook the fact that it is important to see the house after the sale is made, preferably when the goods are being installed. In this way you guard against possible disappointment, ensure good will, and often find room for more merchandise.
There are three general methods for dealing with these room sales. The choice between them will depend upon your judgment as to the probable reactions of the customer.
Setting Up a Complete Room in Advance.
Measure the room accurately, locating doors and windows; study the room, and so far as possible the disposition, tastes, and means of the buyers; select harmonious furnishings for the entire room, usually with one or more substitutes for the most important pieces; lay out the room with chalk, or with a chalk line or string tacked to the floor, with recesses for the windows and openings for the doors in their exact locations; set up the room with the merchandise selected, keeping the substitutes at one side for emergency use; arrange to have the customers call by appointment; and show the whole setting, making your talk while they examine it.
If you know the people, and feel sure that the total cost of the room is not far above what they expect to spend, this is a good method. Otherwise there is some danger that they will dislike one or more single elements of the room, and without giving you the opportunity to correct them, reject the whole setting; and also that they may ask for the total price before a real desire for the setting has been aroused, find it unexpectedly high, and refuse to pay it.
Building Up Room With Customers.
Proceed as above to the point where the room is laid out; but instead of actually placing the furniture keep it at one side; explain to the buyers the lay-out of the room, locating the doors and windows; have the furnishings brought in and placed by porters one piece at a time, starting with the floor covering. This will give you the chance to prepare their minds for each piece, and to sell your picture as they see it grow before their eyes; to make immediate substitutions in case one of your selections fails to please; and to reduce the price hazard.
For example, they may ask the price of some important piece such as the rug or sofa, or you may quote it in the course of your talk. If there is a quick objection, you will be able to reassure them by a statement that something of similar appearance but lower price can be substituted later without marring the total effect.
Laying Out Room to Scale.
Proceed at the outset as in above; but instead of laying out the actual room, prepare a scale drawing on a regular floor plan, to the scale of a ¼ inch to 1 foot, or a large drawing to the scale of 1 inch, to 1 foot. Make drawings or symbols of the furniture to be used to the same scale, cut them out, and fix them to the floor plan by means of thumb tacks. This will permit shifting them about in case of question as to the arrangement of the room. Have the furnishings assembled, and brought in by porters as needed and arranged in small intimate groups, if space permits. Otherwise carry the drawing board with you as you take your customers through the stock from one of the proposed pieces to the next.
This method is necessary in small stores where it is practically impossible to spare floor space for a display lasting several hours. It can be made somewhat more effective by drawing in the four-wall elevations and indicating the space relationships of furniture and walls.
In the ordinary ensemble sale where no advance preparation is possible, quick thinking and smooth action are essential. Such a sale may start anywhere, but ordinarily you will start it where your stock is most complete, or where for any other reason you expect to encounter minimum resistance. Many stores have a series of model rooms, or several series furnished completely at different price levels. A visit to these rooms will give the salesman a fair idea, of what his customers consider necessary, what they are prepared to pay, and where to start the sale.