The old rock song by Eddie Cochran has the hook, “There Ain’t No Cure For The Summertime Blues!” In our industry, almost everyone anticipates a drop off in summer sales revenues. It is a foregone conclusion for most everyone in the piano business. We really should have sent this out previous to summer starting, but the idea came up in June so we put it together as fast as we could without getting slipshod. This article is about how to cure the summer time sales blues. It is about two critical things: How to make this summer productive from a sales standpoint and how to avoid a sales drop off next year.
The summer time can be a valuable selling period in a couple of different ways: One, pulling in sales that have been in the pipeline for a while and whose gestation period has come to an end. Secondly, it is a great time to hold events and execute activities that will help stuff the pipeline with both immediate and future sales opportunities. We will examine both of these important items, their value and how many piano companies have successfully executed them. They will be presented in a “Top 10 Things to Maximize Your Summer Sales” format.
Before I address these things I want to talk about the difference between perception and reality, and how people can create a reality that doesn’t need to be. As a young sales professional, I was working for a large company who was eventually purchased by Cox Communications. It was named “Mainstreet Marketing” and the company had sales representatives that cold called on the streets, approaching independent businesses, in other words “moms and pops.” I hired on during the summer and I’ll spare you irrelevant details but tell you that the pervasive mindset of the sales staff nationally, which sales management accepted as a seasonal occurrence, was that during the week of Thanksgiving and well after Christmas into the second full week of the next year, selling was by and large a waste of time. The staff went through the motions with little hope of success and didn’t allow themselves to be excited about the pipeline of opportunities they could build that would benefit them after the slow period was over. They went on cruise control, accepting the fact that during this particular time of the year, a lot of sales were not possible or likely so “why kill yourself?” I was the odd man out because I was new with less than a year under my belt as the holiday season approached and I NEEDED to sell. I had come to Nashville to be a writer and that takes quite some time to pay off; I had bills to pay and could not afford to cruise through Q4 without any sales, so I did the exact opposite of what the rest of the team did. We were challenged to make 20 cold calls a day and have 3-4 presentations a week. During this period, the presentations dwindled to “next to nothing” and the cold calls went down to about 5-8 per day. This was an unspoken, yet accepted, attitude in this company’s culture.
Personally, I had moved to Nashville to be a writer and all the publishers on Music Row said, ”get yourself established so you can be in town and become a part of the music culture”. I was determined to do what it took to stay in Nashville so I doubled my cold calls. I figured out the SIC’s that opened early, hit the streets and hit them first, called on the usual suspects midday and those that stayed open later in the afternoon and early evening. I stayed away from retailers who depended on Q4 to make their year, knowing I would be a nuisance.
I’ll spare you all the details but I did pace myself and shooting for 40 cold calls a day averaged 36. This was good enough because a couple times a day I stumbled onto someone who wanted to talk and spent some time in some long and meaningful conversations. I did get presentations every week and closed 50% of them, resulting in several deals in a supposedly “dead month”, but what follows is the kicker. One of those deals I wrote was a dry cleaner with 12 locations who happened to be the President of the “National Dry Cleaners Association.” That deal not only gave me a better month than anyone in the company nationwide but became an endorsement that turned into 50 dry cleaners nationally and many had multiple locations! Not only was my November good but the dreaded December was also good and my start to the next year was lined up with presentations with people who wanted me to “get back to them after the first of the year.” Oh, yea, I got some colleagues calling me and saying “What the hell are you doing? They’re going to expect us to keep up the pace even when we’re needing a break!” To which I replied, ”Then take a vacation, I’ve got bills to pay.”
The take-away is that after busting my hump in November and December, my pipeline was healthy and it launched me into the new year loaded for bear. This is a prime example of ignoring the status quo to rise above it, something that any piano salesperson can do during the summer months to set up the killer Q4 that is desired. I am not suggesting you are as desperate as I was in my early life to survive, but the lesson learned was that EVERYDAY is a day worth of activity that can pay future dividends. It was a lesson in intensively examining opportunities and building relationships with trust so that when the time is right, you are the one they trust the most and come to.
As Joey and I sit at the dashboard of the largest group of piano interest leads ever harvested, we learn from our clients and their activities, both good and bad things. We have compiled TEN THINGS YOU CAN DO TO INCREASE YOUR SALES DURING SUMMER. They are sales and cultivating activities that can endear you/your staff to a large number of piano interest potential buyers. They do require some work but greatness usually does. Here are some proven winners:
Top 10 Things to Maximize Your Summer Sales
#1) Make Friends with Local Institutions
Institutions include churches, schools, arts organizations and interior designers. You can host guest speakers of interest to specific institutions and sponsor workshops relative to their needs. You can use postal mail, email, and chase them with PR phone calls so they can be convinced that you should be their “go to” person/company for information and service and not merely sales.
#2) Work on Your Social Media Presence
The goal in a nutshell is to look like a “happening” musical hub. In addition to regular posts about happy customers, events in the gallery and such things, consider writing a series of “information oriented” brief writing to also be posted. Position yourself as THE friendliest and most dependable source of all things piano.
#3) Host a Free In-Store Piano Tutorial Workshop
The typical acoustic piano has over 10,000 working parts; most consumers are not aware of the constitutional complexity of the instrument and can easily be persuaded to look at the advantages of buying a new one because of the this fact. Additionally, for years Steinway dealers have offered a “Secrets of Steinway ” presentation which promotes the trademark construction advantages and uniqueness of a hand-made Steinway piano. Yamaha and Kawai dealers could easily create a construction event called the “Secrets of ___________ (any brand)” and promote the benefits of their main brand.
#4) Plan an In-Store Piano Giveaway Campaign
Events that bring people in to qualify for the drawing of a free piano or lessons are a great way to get parents, teachers and students involved in a store sponsored give-a-way. This can be a very successful, pipeline-filling party or musical event. The piano(s) awarded may also, in many cases, be transferred into a nice discount toward the purchase of a better instrument as well therefore becoming a sales opportunity.
#5) Create an in store Piano Performance Contest
Years ago I had a client who took one of my suggestions to heart and created an annual “Fun Recital”, where area teachers encouraged their students to participate in a recital where students performed movie scores, Broadway and popular songs while dressing the part of the composition chosen. This is one approach but just an example. Create a unique themed recital while making friends with teachers who have multiple students, and their students who are future piano buyers.
# 6) Host an In-store Piano Technology Seminar
Attendees can learn the most modern features of digital and player pianos available today. Demonstrate all the capabilities including live streaming music catalogs, recording, composition possibilities, distance learning and just plain old karaoke.
#7) Follow-up With Your Old Leads
Assuming you have a CRM and an email marketing platform, with your audiences tagged or flagged you can reignite many for whom the timing has now arrived to purchase. Since there is less and less compulsive buying in the current economy, it makes nurturing leads and reconnecting with old ones more pragmatic than ever. Create mini-marketing messages appropriate to the lead types such as a “Step Up in a Grand Way” to upright prospects. Create other titles appropriate to the specific lead types. A promo about hybrids to keyboard and acoustic interest prospects and past buyers makes sense. Get creative and figure out new reasons to re-engage with old leads.
#8) Create an Email Marketing Info Series
Choose 8-12 informational blogs that are not sales oriented and rotate them with the harvesting blogs so you cut down on opt outs and keep your readership and engagement up. You can’t cry wolf and tell the consumers that every month is their best opportunity with a sale without tarnishing your credibility, so give twice as much as you ask for and you will receive more.
#9) Enter Into Strategic Event Partnerships with Local Businesses
Many businesses in your market share many of the same profile elements as do your prime prospects. Forge relationships that allow you to share ‘live” events with them. Local upscale retailers have similar targeting as do piano dealers. Jewelry stores, oriental rugs, top of the market furniture galleries, and high end auto dealers all make great community business friends. When anyone creates a specific day or weekend event where they invite their preferred list, spice up the party with some music which includes technology and expose their invitees to your products, and invite your prospects to their party to see your goods in action.
#10 Create an Annual Promotional Calendar
What are the advantages of a well throughout promotional calendar? There are many, here are a few: Knowing what you want to do before you do it allows you to know when to start preparing for an event be it for PR or harvesting. This eliminates what happens too often – throwing something together which performs like it was.
Secondly, having a promotional calendar that is drafted ahead of time gives the sales staff time to contact those most interested in the theme and help create the highest possible attendance result
Another great reason is that you can step back and look at the scheduled promotions and examine them to be sure that all the most important COI’s (centers of influence) are represented, and that there is a theme on the books that will create an excuse to network with and catalyze all the most important groups or pools of piano lovers, and show the benefits all the most important instruments and their capabilities that people should know about.
In summary, there is no reason to sit on your hands and concede to the summer time sales blues. As any good sales person or organization knows: tomorrow’s bounty is a result of doing a lot of things right WAY before it happened. This isn’t on the list of ten above but here is a thought – if you truly have “down time”, then the excuse to not study your craft that was used because you were too busy theoretically doesn’t exist during this slow period. What about taking some time to examine your approaches, be it calling, texting, emailing or reaching out through social media? Check them for their performance and fundamentals; make sure you aren’t leaving too much meat on the bone by refusing to self-examine and tweak.
Summer can be when you set the ball up on the tee so well that you ace your last months in Q-3 and 4. If making the most of your summertime activity is not part of your current sales culture, then don’t wonder why you end up with the summertime sales blues. Attitude is most often the prerequisite to anything, good or bad. It is regularly a “self fulfilling prophecy”… either way. Don’t simply take it from me that planning head of time and taking advantage of seasons without as much natural demand, can be productive and profitable, read the following words and wisdom from those more astute and famous than I:
“Time isn’t the main thing, it’s the only thing” – Miles Davis
“Lack of direction, not lack of time is the problem. We all have 24 hour days”– Zig Ziglar
“A plan is what, a schedule is when. It takes both a plan and a schedule to get things done”– Peter Turla
“If I had six hours to cut down a tree, I would spend the first four sharpening the axe”– Abraham Lincoln
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Jack that is a fantastic article. Thank you for taking time to share that with me.