Upselling Lotion: Rules (Rules To Live By When Upselling Lotion)

Lotion sales account for a good portion of a salon’s monthly revenue—10 percent to 30 percent, to be exact, according to statistics from LOOKING FIT’s Top 250 Salons issue. If you are closer to the 10-percent range, do you drive that percentage up simply by selling more lotions? Not necessarily.

Increasing your lotion sales volume certainly will help, but if the lotions you are selling do not cost much to begin with, the increase to your overall sales will be marginal. A better plan of attack is to place your energy in up-selling. The following rules show how this can be accomplished, and are rules I follow in my own salons.

Rule No. 1: Never say never.

Don’t tell me your customers won’t pay the high prices of top-shelf lotions. I used to think that way, refusing to carry a bottle that cost more than $50 because I assumed people in my area were too cheap to spend more than that on lotion. But all that did was make it harder for me to sell the $50 lotions I did stock. I changed my mind when Designer Skin introduced Believe in a large-sized bottle. Despite costing more than $60, Believe was my top-selling lotion that year. That taught me I could sell a lotion in the more-than-$50 price range. So, I brought in some lotion priced at $70. Then I added lotions costing more than $100 per bottle. Most recently, I added Cypher from California Tan, which retails at $129—and it’s flying off the shelves. But how does this work? Well ...

Rule No. 2: Always present your top lotions first.

You can’t sell a $50 bottle of lotion if you show the customer a $20 bottle first. The idea is the $129 bottle will help sell the $110 bottle, the $110 lotion will help sell the $89 lotion and so on down the line. If you’re good enough, you’ll sell that $129 bottle—and by “good enough,” I mean that you are showing that customer exactly why that bottle is worth its high price. To do that, you must know the lotion in and out—from the top-notch ingredients to how it works, feels and smells. With Cypher, I focus on the fact that it contains an ingredient that deciphers DNA and allows the tanner to achieve a darker tan in less time. Ultimately, you should know at least three things about every lotion you are trying to sell, and when you are dealing with a lotion priced at more than $100, be sure to choose the qualities that set that lotion apart from all the others.

(Note: Showing a customer why a particular lotion is worth its price is a key part of up-selling. You need to be able to explain what’s unique about the lotion—which generally includes a discussion of ingredients. Brush up on your ingredient lingo with our 2008 Lotion Ingredients Glossary, compliments of Australian Gold, California Tan and Designer Skin.)