Wednesday, March 6, 2013

Our March Goal

We had neat staff meetings this week at each of our two locations. We introduced our March promotion which is designed to get clients to try a higher level service (our signature haircut instead of our basic haircut). We give them a special deal on it, but only if they prebook. So it becomes a prebooking promotion as well.

In presenting it to the clients we are focusing on wanting them to get the full signature experience - we're not focusing on the prebooking, although they need to do that to get the deal.

So in our meetings I told each group how many basic haircuts they did in January and asked them how many they thought they could convert to a signature cut under this promo. To my surprise, estimates like 50% and 60% were tossed out. We crunched some numbers and actually ended up closer to 30% for our goal (considering we need to clear two hurdles...get them to prebook and choose a higher level service). We set two goals - a base goal that is achievable if we focus - and a stretch goal that we will only hit if we totally kick butt. The rewards - for the base goal we will bring lunch in for everyone and close the salon down for an hour so everyone can enjoy the meal together. For the stretch goal we get the lunch and $25 per person. The increase in sales will more than pay for these incentives when the goals are hit.

The reason I describe the meetings as "neat" is that we had so much input from the team. The managers did not just assign a goal to the team. We discussed it and agreed together. In this way the team owns it and they are more likely to work for it. The other interesting thing is how high their original estimates were! They weren't aiming low for something they would hit easily. They put out numbers that will really challenge them.

Now each location is designing their own scoreboard so they can keep track of their progress. We also did a little role-playing in our meetings to help script out the delivery of the offer to our clients.

I'm anxious to see how it goes! I think everyone is ready for the challenge.

2 comments:

  1. Hi Cindy!

    So for March my salon ran it's first promotion. I would love to say it was the picture of success, but to be honest it was a total flop. We ran it for our Shine Treatment. It is normally $45, but for March it is $35. We also had it on FB where if you "like and share" the post then you would be entered to win one for free and the winner would be chosen today. However, not one person got one. I know we're a new salon, and we could've talked about it more, and maybe we should have changed our verbage on the phone, or maybe gotten mirror talkers... I guess I just wanted a miracle? Those happen, right? :)

    Taylor

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    1. Live and learn! A couple of questions...do your clients have a good understanding of what a Shine Treatment is and what it's benefits are? Did you have a specific goal as to how many you wanted to sell? (I know sometimes it's a wild-ass guess, but it's something to shoot for).
      Next time you might want to structure your offer differently. People are all about the free. Is there something you can offer for free when another service is purchased? Like free conditioning treatment with first time color service or free lip wax with brow wax.

      The following is an excerpt from a blog called eslpod.com. It has a nice summary of a study that is explained in an excellent book called Predictably Irrational. It shows the power of FREE.

      "One section of the book discusses what happens when businesses give away things free (or “FREE!” as Ariely writes it). Everyone likes things that are free, and businesses on the Internet and in the “real” world often will give things away (give things for free) to customers as a way of getting more people to pay attention to their products. But can “free” actually be a bad thing for us?

      Ariely conducted some experiments on how people reacted to things that were FREE! He offered a group of students two kinds of chocolates: a small piece of very good, well-known chocolate for 15 cents, and a small piece of chocolate that was not very good quality for 1 cent. The good chocolate piece was probably worth $1.00, so getting it for 15 cents was a very good deal, but the poor quality chocolate was only worth about 5 cents, so getting it for 1 cent wasn’t a great deal (a good bargain, where you get something cheaper than normal).

      Which would you choose? Most people chose the high quality chocolate for 15 cents, since it was much cheaper than normal. That’s not a surprise. But then Ariely lowered the price of both pieces of chocolate by 1 cent – 14 cents for the good quality chocolate, 0 cents (FREE!) for the low quality chocolate. Remember that the high quality chocolate is still a much better bargain than the low quality one. If people were rational (thinking correctly or intelligently), then they should still choose the good quality chocolate. But that isn’t what happened. The majority of people actually choose the FREE! chocoloate. This doesn’t make sense in our normal way of understanding economic behavior. People should choose the best deal, which is the good chocolate for 14 cents, but they don’t. They choose the FREE! item instead.

      What is going on (happening) here? Part of the explanation Ariely gives is that people want to get a good bargain, but they also want to minimize risk. That is, they want to reduce or lower the chance that they will make a mistake. If you pay 15 cents for a piece of chocolate, and then you don’t actually like it when you eat it, you are out (you have lost) 15 cents. But when something is FREE! and you don’t like it, you haven’t lost anything. People would prefer not to take a risk over getting a better bargain."

      Give that some thought and see if you can structure an offer that will be more appealing to your clients. Then set a goal for how many you want to sell and write down your plan to accomplish it.
      By the way, for the mirrors, we use wet erase markers (like they use on menu boards) to write directly on the mirrors. You can get them at craft or office supply stores. Have your mirrors just bring up the topic..."Ask me how to get a blow out for free!"

      Good luck!

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