By Grant Miller

If you are a salon owner, you need to accept the fact that most staff will never be as motivated and good at selling as you probably are. It’s really not their fault. Most staff members are working for you while they continue their college education, working part-time or just passing through until they get a different job.

Working in retail requires a certain skill set and attitude that the typical 9-5, Monday through Friday mentality people just don’t understand. I love retail, and I love selling, so I can’t imagine doing anything else. Often times, though, your staff isn’t quite as motivated as you are.

After all, they don’t have skin in the game like us owners do. We bought or built our business from scratch. We’ve invested large amounts of money, have leases and obligations that we can’t just easily walk away. So, yes, we are motivated every day to work 24/7 to avoid working a 9-5 job.

Most staff members you hire really do want to be able to do their jobs well. No one takes a job with the intention of not liking it or doing a bad job. What typically happens, though, is that business owners don’t do the best job setting proper expectations and training their staff for peak performance.

One of the best ways to prepare your staff to do their job as well as possible is to have scripts for all the important sales functions. Many people will cringe when they hear the word “scripts,” but without having them, you are at high risk for letting staff say whatever they want.

You need scripts for all sales related functions. They need to know exactly what to say when giving a tour of your facility, how to properly explain your membership and package options to make your EFT membership the best option for the client to buy, what to say when someone wants to cancel a membership, how to explain the benefits and features of the lotions you sell, what to say on the phone when a person asks what are your specials today, and how to answer frequently asked questions.

Anything that needs to be explained to a client should be scripted out so every staff member is saying the same information to all clients all the time. Without proper scripting, you would be amazed what some of your staff are telling clients!

Once you have good scripts, they need to be drilled into your staff’s head and reviewed constantly to ensure they are being followed. Without follow-up and constant reminding of what they should say, your staff will revert back to their old habits of saying whatever they like.

The best way to write your scripts is to record what you say to clients when you give a tour, sell a membership, explain the lotions, etc. Then transcribe what you say into scripts for your staff.

It’s important to remember that what you say and how you say it can make a huge difference in how effectively you sell. It can literally be the difference between just surviving and thriving in your business. You need to have systems for how you sell.

If you don’t have a system for selling, you will be at the mercy of the customer for how they want to buy. Read that sentence again; it’s that important. You need to have the systems and the scripts for how you want the customer to buy, not the other way around.

Make a list of all the scripts you need for all the sales functions in your business. Just write one script a day, and in a week or so you will have all the scripts you’ll ever need to make your business more successful and profitable.