Like every industry, mattress retailers are dealing with labor shortages. This has effects everywhere, from the sales floor to inventory to marketing. So naturally, even mattress sales companies with lots of experience and product knowledge find themselves having difficulty adjusting to the new reality.
The good news is that there are ways to improve the sales process in today’s labor shortages. From building a strong partnership with the furniture industry to utilizing technology to stocking the highest quality mattresses, there’s plenty you can do to up your sales.
Even if you have tons of experience in the mattress industry, retail sales can still be a challenge, especially if you’re understaffed and overworked. One of the best ways to meet this challenge is to ensure you a) get everyone through the sales process and to a sale faster and b) ensure fewer returns.
This becomes more possible if you carefully curate each person’s buying experience. That, in turn, means sales associates know your inventory inside and out. Understanding your products' features and benefits can help increase your buyers’ sleep and overall quality of life.
Pro Tip: Although many mom-and-pop mattress companies don’t have a customer resource management (CRM) solution because their customers are often one-time buyers, consider getting one for the future.
Another thing you can do to increase mattress sales is to improve your inventory. From adjustable bases to memory foam mattress options, temperature settings and pressure point accommodation, there’s a mattress for everyone.
Unfortunately, getting the range of options you need to keep customers happy can be challenging. Current hurdles include the slow pace of manufacturing today, wholesale pricing requirements and competition from online vendors. However, you can help combat this by taking a routine inventory of what’s on hand and plugging the gaps with as many choices as possible.
There is an urge in sales to move people through the process quickly. The better to get on to the next potential customer. That is, selling feels like selling, and people know when it’s happening to them.
Instead of selling, have a conversation. Ask people about their sleep. Find out what’s troubling them at night. Figure out what they’ve tried in the past and what hasn’t worked. You can fully address the full range of their concerns only when you understand them.
While it’s difficult to watch someone walk out the door, know that for every person you take extra time with, you’re increasing the chances of a sale and genuinely helping someone.
… because it does. Okay, not really, but your income and the success of your business (or your employers) certainly do. One of the best ways to sell more mattresses is to familiarize yourself with the best practices of the sales process. That means participating in furniture training yourself or making sure they have access if you manage a team.
You might also turn to retail sales experts. For instance, experts like Gerry Morris have 20 years of experience in the mattress industry. He offers a premium online training course, Sell More Mattresses.
One of the best ways to increase the sales process without hiring more people is to put technology to work. Pressure mapping is a relatively new application for the mattress industry and has never been so sensitive. Now you can have people lay down and build an actual 3D map of the body and its pressure points in real-time, based on thousands of data points per second, all translated by cutting-edge software.
With easy-to-use leading-edge technology that records the body’s unique characteristics and spits out the metrics right away, you can instantly increase your chances of matching a person to their perfect mattress, increasing satisfaction and reducing returns – no extra staff needed.
Feel free to get in touch with XSENSOR to learn more about our unique pressure-mapping technologies and software today.