Here is a question worth sitting with for a moment. If you stopped offering discounts tomorrow, what would actually happen to your business?

Most owners flinch at the question because they’ve come to believe their customers will not pay full price. And in many salons, that is now true. But it didn’t have to be true, and the reason it became true is worth understanding, because it determines whether your salon can ever charge what it is actually worth.

Every discount you run teaches your customers something. A one-time discount teaches them they got lucky. A monthly discount teaches them that your real price is the discounted price, and that anyone paying full menu rate is paying too much. After enough cycles of this, you have trained your customer base to wait for the next promotion before they buy anything. They are no longer your customers; they are your discount hunters. And once you have built a discount-trained customer base, the only way to drive revenue is to discount more aggressively, which trains them further, which forces you to discount further. The math eats itself.

Click here to read the entire article in the latest issue of Smart Tan Magazine online.