Sell More: Tips & Tricks

In a toy store, the product is a toy. In a plant store, it’s a plant. In a salon, the product you are selling is the tanning session or any of the other ancillary services you provide. It isn’t a tangible, concrete item, but it is a marketable product nonetheless.

When a large corporation decides to begin production of a new product, it does a great deal of research to determine what features will entice the desired audience to buy it. It then sets out to design a product with those features that will be attractive to the audience.

Are you catering to the under-30 age group? To women aged 30-50? To retired persons? To professionals on their lunch break or on the way home from work? It is entirely possible to offer services for all of these audiences in one facility, but the needs and wants of each group will be different.

Those in the first group will be receptive to tanning and to a variety of fitness and beauty services, but it may take some personal selling to hook them on some of your other ancillary services.

Professionals at lunch are pressed for time. If they can take the time to come in, they will be in a hurry and may book appointments well in advance for quick tanning sessions. They may pass up other services, unless the session time is short. On their way home, time is often less of a factor. After a busy day, a stop at your salon may be considered time to unwind. While a fast tanning booth or a 10-minute bed may be the ticket for lunching yuppies in a time crunch, a slower bed with a good sound system could be the key to reaching rush-hour relaxation.

In assembling and re-evaluating the product line of your salon, then, you need to visualize the prospective audience for each service and then look at ways to tailor that service to that audience. Certain services will lend themselves to a particular audience and vice versa.

Price is still one of the guiding factors that companies live by because it represents the power of logic and marketplace. A product must be sold at a price high enough for a company to make a profit but low enough to entice the consumer to buy it. More specifically, a producer will consider a number of factors when structuring the final price:

• cost of production
• consumer price attitudes
• competition pricing
• laws governing fair pricing

• industry pressures

As a general rule to fiscal happiness is never regularly sell something for less than it costs. That is not to say that you can’t give free promotional sessions to boost your potential customer base, just don’t make a habit of it.

There are other ways of getting new customers into your salon. In figuring what each session costs you, simply add up your costs for a month and divide by the number of sessions taken. If you take everything into account—including utilities, space, rent, payments on the machinery, maintenance and payroll—you should come up with a fairly accurate per-session cost. Include the desired profit and the result is the target price.