Creating a solid plan on paper is the easy part. The real challenge is getting your team to buy in. Stick with it! If you have the right plan, they’ll gradually get on board. If not, you’ll know when it’s time to bring in someone who will.

In a conversation with the leadership team from another salon group, veteran tanning business owner and operator Scott Nichols referenced the concept of “strategy versus talent.” While talent Is always important, the right strategy can improve the performance of your most talented employees and help overcome the limitations of less experienced and polished team members. As long as they’re willing to buy in.

You know what’s best for your business, and it’s your staff’s job to follow the protocol you put in place. But any plan that’s good for your business should also be good for your employees. Most people thrive with structure. They’re more likely to follow your direction when given clear, step-by-step guidance. Without it, they may lack confidence, fall back on bad habits, and ultimately miss the results that are geared to benefit the business as well as their paychecks!

This principle applies to nearly every aspect of business, but in this case, we’re focusing on maximizing EFT revenue – specifically, upgrading existing memberships to your highest tiers. Everybody knows about the concept of upselling, but how often is it actually happening in your business, especially with memberships? What if every client was offered more every time they visited? If you operate with some form of “tanning spa” model with an all-inclusive membership upwards of $100, how much would converting even a small percentage of lower-tier members to that top level make you per month?

And, at the end of the day, why wouldn’t your customers want to be offered more every time they come in? In an article geared toward salon staff members, Nichols posed the question, “What is your job as a customer service representative?” Here’s what he said:

“I think, for most of us, the first thing we think about when asked this question is to put someone in a tanning bed, red light or sunless booth. If you think that’s the job, you will struggle! Sales will be difficult, and you will eventually find the job dull and boring. So, what is the correct answer? It’s to make the customers happy! I know, I know, that sounds corny, but it’s true. When I get a chance to be behind the desk, my mindset goes to finding a way to make as many customers happy as possible. I always find out why the customer is tanning, ask them if their goals are being met, and if they are looking for more color. If they say yes, they are looking for a little more color, you can talk to them about sunless, upgrading, and using different lotions.

“It’s our job to make the customer happy! The employee who can do this will be the employee who has the highest sales. Did you do anything special for the customers today? Maybe you talk to them about their tan and get them to upgrade. Did you continue to talk to the customer when they came out of the upgraded tan? In most cases, they will love the upgrade and love you for giving them something better. The customers will walk out your door happy.”

In short, a happy customer is one who is getting the best experience and results, feels that they’re being catered to, and is getting the best value for their money. Fortunately, that’s what the top-tier memberships in most salons today provide.

Training and incentivizing your staff to convert visitors to members has been the predominant focus of many salons in recent years, but it’s time to look beyond that. Membership is the present and certainly the future of the tanning industry and maximizing profitability will continue to depend on not just getting more members but getting more members at your highest levels. So, just like you should certainly have a plan for your staff members to endeavor to sign every customer up for a membership, you should have a plan for them to follow with the goal of upgrading every member to a higher tier with every interaction.

Offer Up

The concept of upgrading memberships sounds pretty straightforward, but again, the hard part is in the execution. You’re already trying, but the point of having a real plan is to up your conversion rate. How many members are you upgrading each week currently? Now try to double that. Then triple it.

To do so, you have to make a plan and stick to it. It won’t happen overnight, but your end goal is to get your team to be consistent with what they’re offering as well as how they’re offering it. The centerpieces of the plan are the “carrots” – a variety of small incentives that give your staff members something to bring up and offer in conversations with members that will motivate them to upgrade. But your team needs “carrots” too – you also need specific employee incentives tied to anything you want them to push.

Every week, have a meeting with all staff members where you’ll emphasize your priorities for the week. Give them specific benefits of higher-tier memberships to focus on that week. Maybe it’s the enhanced product discounts or a specific service or unit they can gain access to. If you can’t get everyone together for a meeting every week, or even if you can, reinforce the plan by printing out documents and keeping them behind the counter. The more you can provide for your staff to rely on, the better, and the more likely they’ll embrace and stick to the plan. List any number of offers and priorities along with some talking points to use in a variety of scenarios.

If you have services or equipment that are being underutilized, give them the autonomy to offer free sessions for one or more services or units that week. “If there is a bed open that the customer can upgrade to (and they haven’t tried it before), put them in it!” Nichols wrote. “Think of how much you spend on advertising and marketing – the goal is to put customers at our highest level, and literally you have a customer in front of you and a bed open. Put them in it!”

It may not be every week, but perhaps at least one week a month, you can institute a membership upgrade special. Offer a free session, package, or highly discounted product as a reward for upgrading. Have a higher-end service like SmartSun Therapy that’s not included in other memberships? Leverage that to get that upgrade commitment. Four SST28 sessions are often valued by salons at around $160, but giving it away doesn’t really cost anything and can be highly persuasive.

While tying a commitment to staying at the higher level for a specified amount of time may seem pragmatic in order to keep clients from abusing these offers and downgrading the next month, it may do more harm than good. By making it as easy as possible to upgrade, you’ll undoubtedly gain more conversions. Then track how long customers maintain their membership levels thereafter. Even if some customers abuse the system, if you’re able to convert even a small percentage to a higher level for a long period of time, the offer will likely have paid off significantly.

Upgrading one customer from $89 a month to $119 means an additional $40 per month revenue and almost $500 for the year. If you can utilize offers to upgrade 10 clients that will stay at that level for a year, that’s almost $5000. When you think about it in those terms, it’s probably safe to say that it’s worth it. At the end of the day, even by offering a 50% product discount or a free upgrade, you didn’t really lose any money outright, and you still gave them a perk that is likely to influence their loyalty in some shape or form.

If you did want to make a commitment part of the offer, you could consider getting more aggressive. If you want to engineer an upgrade promotion with a year-long commitment, how much is it sensible to offer? To get that $500 of revenue based on upgrading from $89 to $119, how much are you willing to give up? Even giving away one to three months of access at the next level while paying their current rate before their new rate kicks in would be directly profitable and hopefully encourage them to stay at the higher level longer than a year.

Of course, you can use a much more subtle approach in most cases. Get creative! When you start thinking about all the angles, there are countless different ways to promote any one single service, unit or level while also bringing something of value to the table. Say red light therapy is included in only your top-tier all-access membership. You can certainly leverage that service to incentivize upgrades by offering a free session and showing them how great it is, but you can also do so by highlighting and promoting hybrid tanning products that are designed for use with UV and red light therapy. A standard promotion on such a product is enough to start a conversation about red light that’s likely to pique their interest.

Strike Up a Conversation

This process isn’t about hassling your clients every time they visit. You need to be offering them something of value. And it’s better when it seems more natural. Train your staff members to look for opportunities to offer clients more. To do so, they first need to strike up a conversation.

Develop talking points that staff members can use by segmenting clients into different categories on the fly. The most obvious segmentation is their current level of membership. Rather than trying to take a client from base-level membership to all-access in one fell swoop, focus on what it would take to move them to the next level up. Then repeat.

When it comes to higher-level members, focus on the specific equipment and products they currently utilize to try to identify what else might appeal to them. Also encourage your staff members to draw from their own experience. Make sure they have access to all the services and products you can offer and can speak directly about the benefits and results they experienced themselves to provide a compelling sales pitch that seems more conversational.

And, make sure your staff members understand that an effective upsell that doesn’t come off as pushy almost always starts with getting the client talking. You can only try to upsell a regular customer so many times before it gets old for both of you, but when you get them talking, opportunities will arise. As salespeople utilize this approach and hone their skills, they’ll become more effective at picking up cues and knowing how to capitalize and make the right offer without it seeming like a sales pitch.

One talking point you can train staff members to pull out whenever they find it useful is promising your clients that their membership price will never increase as long as it remains active. If you’ve increased membership pricing recently, hopefully in conjunction with investments in equipment and the salon, you can tell staff not to be shy about mentioning that. In today’s world, price increases are inevitable, and if you’re continuing to invest in new and better experiences for your customers, it won’t be long before you’ll be justified in increasing again. Remind them that if they lock in at the top level now, they’ll save money in the long run by upgrading now rather than after prices go up.

Rewarding the Right Sales

No matter how effectively you structure your program, you’re still only going to be successful at selling what your consultants are incentivized to sell. You know your commission should always be weighted heavily toward selling memberships. The commission you pay is well worth it, since a membership guarantees repeat revenue. Commission for a membership sale should depend completely on the level of membership sold. If employees aren’t highly motivated to sell higher levels of membership, they simply won’t do it, whether they’re good employees or not. That’s because they’re going to make more money by sticking to the easiest sale possible.

Most tanning businesses probably already follow that protocol, but what some might be forgetting are the opportunities to move current members up, and the fact that it won’t happen without incentivizing your staff.

Do you offer commission when employees upgrade a current client’s membership? You definitely should. Keeping that option in the front of your team’s minds will ensure that they’re always working to upsell the client, whereas without proper motivation they’ll just become order takers when a member comes through the door.

Paying your staff more is a good thing. It’s good for hiring, for morale, for retention, and when your employees’ compensation is based primarily on commission, it’s definitely good for your sales. With a well-strategized commission program, staff members are not only motivated but empowered. They’ll be inspired to learn more, educate clients better, and be more friendly and outgoing because those efforts will lead to better sales and more income. With a commission program that emphasizes the sales priorities of your business, your training can evolve from “Here’s what you need to do” to “This is how you’re going to achieve success in this role and increase your income.”

“We put a bonus on the sales that make us successful. It’s not packages. It’s not sessions. We put a bonus on the things that make our company healthy. We want to direct them into selling the things we want sold and reward them with a bonus on memberships,” Nichols says.

Some innovative salon owners like Dennis Ligon of Sundays Sun Spa go as far as to offer recurring commission every month for members that a staff member signed up. That incentivizes them to not just sell memberships but focus more intently on service and customer satisfaction that will keep them around and keep the money rolling in. In that case, the recurring commission will obviously depend on the level or dollar amount of the membership, so sales staff will also benefit directly from upgrading memberships.

What Now?

When someone reaches the top level of membership, your job is done, right? Not quite.

There’s always something else you can offer, whether it’s an additional service, a new product, or a simple reminder of the discounts their membership provides. Even if members have access to everything, chances are they’re not fully utilizing it. Encourage them to explore all their benefits so they clearly see the value before they ever consider canceling.

If upgrading members to the top tier feels too easy, it might be a sign that your pricing is too low. That’s an opportunity to refine your strategy – add more value, raise the price of your all-inclusive membership, or introduce a new super-premium tier with exclusive equipment or services.

And as your team gets better at selling memberships, more of your visitors will already be members. That means your staff needs to shift their focus – keeping members engaged, enhancing their experience, and increasing product sales. Prioritizing membership sales and upgrades isn’t just about revenue; it leads to better client education, improved service, and a stronger ability to match customers with the right solutions – creating a cycle of satisfaction and long-term retention.