1. Full knowledge of your own merchandise from the technical and artistic aspects.2. Considerable knowledge of the customer's room and its important elements.3. Adequate knowledge of decorative principles, including the emotional values of light, color, texture, line, and proportion.4. A little knowledge of the decorative accessories—pictures, potteries, glass, embroideries, and the many small things necessary to save a room from bareness, and to give it color, snap, and intimacy.
1. Full knowledge of your own merchandise from the technical and artistic aspects.
2. Considerable knowledge of the customer's room and its important elements.
3. Adequate knowledge of decorative principles, including the emotional values of light, color, texture, line, and proportion.
4. A little knowledge of the decorative accessories—pictures, potteries, glass, embroideries, and the many small things necessary to save a room from bareness, and to give it color, snap, and intimacy.
It is desirable but by no means necessary that you have these accessories for sale; however, you must know how to talk about them, because it is impossible to make a living room genuinely attractive and satisfying without them.
Few furniture men appreciate the extent to which sales volume is restricted by insistence upon selling parts instead of finished products. Not only is furniture displayed as a pharmacist displays drugs in the rows of bottles on his shelves; but also customers are asked to do their own compounding and to accept full responsibility for the results.
Many salesmen habitually assure the buyer that her room will be comfortable and beautiful after they have placed in it a sofa, two chairs, an end table, one floor lamp, and a radio. Of course it isn't, and disappointment results. She sees her room as bare, thin, spotty, unhomelike, and unlovely. She knows something is wrong, but she is without knowledge to correct it.
Ensemble selling and complete room settings are the home-furnishings industry's modern answer. Unless she is able to arrange the major pieces of her furniture in a manner that will show them to the best advantage, unless she has at least the requisites in the smaller pieces, lamps, and other accessories, she may never get the full satisfaction that she should for the money she has spent in the furniture store. It is the salesperson's duty to fit his customer's purchases into a complete room or home.
In ensemble selling, don't lecture, talk about yourself, or appear in any way to be airing your knowledge. Simply talk in an off-hand manner, as if you were dealing in commonplaces as familiar to your customer as to yourself. The important matter is to learn promptly enough about her room to enable you to link some of its characteristics with the characteristics of your merchandise, so that as you point out the many desirable features of her room, and the perfect way in which your furniture harmonizes with and emphasizes these features, she is brought to the conviction that she should have the room just as you have pictured it, and therefore must have your furniture, without regard to what other stores may have to offer.
This method is not too easy when one first begins to employ it, nor should it be used with every customer. It will interest a surprisingly large percentage of customers, and it often will result in a sale in situations where all other methods fail. It is planned selling, which, based on the enlightened self-interest of the buyer, helps her to buy, and so smoothes the path before her that she may purchase her needs room by room.
Many important sales will involve the complete room ensemble or the complete house ensemble both of which are used to the great advantage of the store and of the public. Usually such sales are in sight long enough in advance to permit you to study and measure the rooms. In important sales of this kind, try to get the head of the house in for the first showing. You will probably be unable to close the sale without him, and he will be likely to save your time as well as to increase the amount of the sale. Do not overlookthe fact that it is important to see the house after the sale is made, preferably when the goods are being installed. In this way you guard against possible disappointment, ensure good will, and often find room for more merchandise.
There are three general methods for dealing with these room sales. The choice between them will depend upon your judgment as to the probable reactions of the customer.
Measure the room accurately, locating doors and windows; study the room, and so far as possible the disposition, tastes, and means of the buyers; select harmonious furnishings for the entire room, usually with one or more substitutes for the most important pieces; lay out the room with chalk, or with a chalk line or string tacked to the floor, with recesses for the windows and openings for the doors in their exact locations; set up the room with the merchandise selected, keeping the substitutes at one side for emergency use; arrange to have the customers call by appointment; and show the whole setting, making your talk while they examine it.
If you know the people, and feel sure that the total cost of the room is not far above what they expect to spend, this is a good method. Otherwise there is some danger that they will dislike one or more single elements of the room, and without giving you the opportunity to correct them, reject the whole setting; and also that they may ask for the total price before a real desire for the setting has been aroused, find it unexpectedly high, and refuse to pay it.
Proceed as above to the point where the room is laid out; but instead of actually placing the furniture keep it at one side; explain to the buyers the lay-out of the room, locating the doors and windows; have the furnishings brought in and placed by porters one piece at a time, starting with the floor covering. This will give you the chance to prepare their minds for each piece, and to sell your picture as they see it grow before their eyes; to make immediate substitutions in case one of your selections fails to please; and to reduce the price hazard.
For example, they may ask the price of some important piece such as the rug or sofa, or you may quote it in the course of your talk. If there is a quick objection, you will be able to reassure them by a statement that something of similar appearance but lower price can be substituted later without marring the total effect.
Proceed at the outset as in above; but instead of laying out the actual room, prepare a scale drawing on a regular floor plan, to thescale of a ¼ inch to 1 foot, or a large drawing to the scale of 1 inch, to 1 foot. Make drawings or symbols of the furniture to be used to the same scale, cut them out, and fix them to the floor plan by means of thumb tacks. This will permit shifting them about in case of question as to the arrangement of the room. Have the furnishings assembled, and brought in by porters as needed and arranged in small intimate groups, if space permits. Otherwise carry the drawing board with you as you take your customers through the stock from one of the proposed pieces to the next.
This method is necessary in small stores where it is practically impossible to spare floor space for a display lasting several hours. It can be made somewhat more effective by drawing in the four-wall elevations and indicating the space relationships of furniture and walls.
In the ordinary ensemble sale where no advance preparation is possible, quick thinking and smooth action are essential. Such a sale may start anywhere, but ordinarily you will start it where your stock is most complete, or where for any other reason you expect to encounter minimum resistance. Many stores have a series of model rooms, or several series furnished completely at different price levels. A visit to these rooms will give the salesman a fair idea, of what his customers consider necessary, what they are prepared to pay, and where to start the sale.
1. What methods do you follow in reducing to a minimum the kinds of competition a salesman must meet in selling furniture for the living room? dining room?
2. A salesman asks his customer: "Just what kind of studio couch do you have in mind?" Why is this bad practice?
3. Why do you use a floor-plan idea for getting a picture of the background which has brought a customer to your store?
4. Suppose a customer seems determined to purchase a piece of furniture which you know is not suited for her use. Do you discourage her at the risk of losing the sale?
5. Suggest three or four good ways to interest your customer in rugs for the living room.
6. Few customers are able to afford use of the most costly furnishings. How do you proceed to convince the average woman that certain essential harmonies actually cost nothing whatever in money?
7. Suppose you are consulted by a young couple soon to be married. They ask you for suggestions for furnishing their five-room apartment. How do you proceed?
8. How does customer age present a problem in selling house furnishings?
9. Why is it not good practice to ask your customer the style of her living room?
10. Work out a plan for furnishing an unattractive hall in the home of a well-to-do couple, and outline steps you would take to call your ideas to their attention?
Burrows, Thelma M.Successful Home Furnishing.Manual Arts Press, Peoria, Ill. 1938.
Burrows, Thelma M.Successful Home Furnishing.Manual Arts Press, Peoria, Ill. 1938.
Draper, Dorothy.Decorating Is Fun.Doubleday, Doran & Co. New York, N. Y. 1939.Goldstein, HarrietandVetta.Art In Every Day Life.The Macmillan Co., New York, N. Y. 1925.
Draper, Dorothy.Decorating Is Fun.Doubleday, Doran & Co. New York, N. Y. 1939.
Goldstein, HarrietandVetta.Art In Every Day Life.The Macmillan Co., New York, N. Y. 1925.
Hagman, I. C.Walls As Background In the Livable Home.Circular 237, University of Kentucky. 1930.Koues, Helen.How To Beautify Your Home.Good Housekeeping, New York, N. Y.
Hagman, I. C.Walls As Background In the Livable Home.Circular 237, University of Kentucky. 1930.
Koues, Helen.How To Beautify Your Home.Good Housekeeping, New York, N. Y.
Palmer, L.Your House.Boston Cooking School Magazine Co. 1928.
Palmer, L.Your House.Boston Cooking School Magazine Co. 1928.
Powell, Lydia.The Four Main Rooms.The Macmillan Co., New York, N. Y. 1939. Pp. 3-39.Priestman, Mabel Tuke.Art and Economy in Home Decoration.John Lane (The Bodley Head, Ltd., London).
Powell, Lydia.The Four Main Rooms.The Macmillan Co., New York, N. Y. 1939. Pp. 3-39.
Priestman, Mabel Tuke.Art and Economy in Home Decoration.John Lane (The Bodley Head, Ltd., London).
Seal Ethel Davis.Furnishing The Little House.The Century Co. New York, N. Y. 1924.
Seal Ethel Davis.Furnishing The Little House.The Century Co. New York, N. Y. 1924.
Wright Agnes Foster.Interior Decoration for Modern Needs.Frederick A. Stokes Co., New York, N. Y.
Wright Agnes Foster.Interior Decoration for Modern Needs.Frederick A. Stokes Co., New York, N. Y.
FOOTNOTES:[27]Every salesman knows how exacting many buyers become when their minds are fixed upon an individual unit. The chair is just a little too this or that; the rug has a square inch of blue where there should be a square inch of red; the cretonne is perfect in design and coloring, but 10 cents a yard more than she had decided to pay; and so on.
[27]Every salesman knows how exacting many buyers become when their minds are fixed upon an individual unit. The chair is just a little too this or that; the rug has a square inch of blue where there should be a square inch of red; the cretonne is perfect in design and coloring, but 10 cents a yard more than she had decided to pay; and so on.
[27]Every salesman knows how exacting many buyers become when their minds are fixed upon an individual unit. The chair is just a little too this or that; the rug has a square inch of blue where there should be a square inch of red; the cretonne is perfect in design and coloring, but 10 cents a yard more than she had decided to pay; and so on.