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

Rule No. 3: Be prepared for the clients who hesitate to pay.

The lotion is expensive; there’s no way around that. While some clients will buy the lotion without batting an eye after your sales spiel, some will require additional convincing. For those clients, I will add to the deal—but only if it is necessary. For example, I will offer two free, high-pressure sessions with purchase of that lotion. At a $70 value, that means the lotion only cost them approximately $59 compared to $129. At least that’s how they see it. What it means to me is that I sold the lotion without having to discount it, and perhaps now I will get an HP customer that wasn’t using HP before.

Rule No. 4: Never prejudge your client.

Don’t look at their clothing, the car they drive, how many kids they have or anything else and use that to decide how much they will spend in your salon. One of my biggest spenders does not look at all like someone you would expect to make extravagant purchases, but between tanning sessions and lotions for her and her daughters—perhaps even a swimsuit or two for each girl—she’s one of my top customers. This also pertains to base-bed tanners. Some people say that promoting high-end lotions to the tanner that never upgrades is a waste of time. To those customers, I say, “Why don’t you come into my salon and tell my 60-year-old base-bed client, Ruth—whose daughter, son, granddaughter and best friend also tan at my salon on her recommendation—that she can’t buy Cypher because she only uses the base bed?” That’s silly, right? If you don’t ask your clients to buy your top-shelf lotions, you will never sell them. It’s as simple as that. Tell everyone! Some will buy. But if you don’t tell anyone, well, no one will buy unless you get lucky and someone wants it because the bottle looks classy.

Every single salon owner can sell these top-of-the-line lotions. The point is not necessarily to increase the amount of lotions you sell, it’s to increase the dollars-per-customer rate on the sales you are already making. Ultimately, it’s all up to you—so get out there and sell!

Tammy DeVore has been in the industry for eight years. She and her husband, Rob, own Island Cove Tanning & Swimwear and have three salon locations in Vancouver Island, British Columbia. The Devores also have a distributorship in Canada called TomorrowSun Tanning Systems and Supplies. For more information, visit www.tomorrowsuncanada.com/.