National Clothesline

I recently shared my top 10 industry tips for route drivers and of course got a few e-mails agreeing and disagreeing with my professional suggestions.

I love input from all of you and please feel free to comment good or bad about any of my articles.

With that being said, many asked about a top 10 tips for the face-to-face sales that must be done to successfully build your routes. Upon reading these, I realized that I have over 100 tips and I am going to do my best to give you ten basic ideas that may be an intellectual insult to some, but they still get overlooked each day.

Before we get to our list, I want to introduce my old formula for defining trust. In reality, we are hoping to establish a business relationship with our clients on a regular basis. We need to convince them that they can trust that we are going to do a good job and get the clothes back right, and right on time.

So how do I define trust? It is easy, and here is my mathematical formula:

TRUST = (Credibility + Reliability + Intimacy) – Self-Orientation.

Think about each element of the above mentioned formula. If people hear of you more, that establishes credibility and thus more trust.

If they can see the quality and not just listen to you ramble about customer satisfaction, they will be more likely to use you.

Also, if the prospect feels like you are the real deal and care about their clothes, trust is increased dramatically.

Your level of trust can be shot down by how much self-orientation or bragging you do about your cleaner. Talking about how good you are over and over is a turn-off and must be limited in any face-to-face situation.

Trust also is a major part of the employee/employer relationship. It is quite simple once you look at the formula as a manager or owner and realize that your trust level is higher or lower for various workers and especially your sales staff.

OK, with that being said, on with the list.

1. Be a product of the product. This is a big one. Too often I see owners, managers and sales staff go out and solicit drycleaning in blue jeans and a faded t-shirt or polo.

This drives me absolutely crazy. How can we establish reliability and trust if we don’t even believe in our own product? Every owner should be on the route and every salesperson should represent drycleaning.

2. Have your 30-second pitch down to a tee. If you stutter or stammer or, even worse, ramble during your first 30 seconds, the prospect will sense that you don’t feel comfortable about your product.

I once had a not-so-successful sales guy tell me that this is hogwash and it depends on the situation. I replied to him that “Depends” are for those who wet their pants and if you pause and have a few hums in your sales pitch, it may appear that you are nervous or worse yet, you may actually be uncomfortable and you might be wishing that you were wearing Depends.

3. God gave us two eyes, two ears and one mouth. This goes in conjunction with number 2 (no intended reference to Depends), in which we must be watching the prospects’ body language and tonality of their voice during our presentation. Failure to do so will lead to just that — failure.

This will help you with the intimacy part if you can read prospects and appear to be confident and attentive to what they respond to.

4. Follow-up or fail. Most sales people in any industry fail because of this. Reliability is magnified by informing the potential customer that you will follow-up with them in a week and you actually do so. Take notes about the experience and when you follow up be laser specific about the previous conversation.

5. Branding. This goes along with being a product of the product. Wear a company shirt and have nice marketing pieces. Your bags must have your name on them and you should stick to the same color throughout the above mentioned items.

When you see red and yellow, you think of McDonalds or maybe even Wells Fargo. Credibility is increased greatly if you would just believe in this recommendation.

6. No excuses. Quit whining about the weather, nobody home, evening interruptions, limited dryclean use, etc. I have heard them all.

You will probably deal with more rejection than success. Usually the reasons for failure become excuses for not going out. The old cliché “failing to try is trying to fail” rings so true here.

So you have bad days, whoopee! Take the good with the bad and go out again.

Remember, Hall of Fame baseball players fail seven out of ten times. Do they give up? This helps with credibility within your company if you are a hired sales manager.

7. Establish monthly minimums. One of the things I shot for was a monthly minimum that I strived to hit by the 20th of the month.

Notice I said “minimums,” not goals. Too often you limit your potential by just doing the weekly minimum only to fall short month after month. I also strived to beat the previous month’s number.

8. Hold yourself accountable. This one is all about you. My favorite line to route/sales managers is this: “If you are successful, you are accountable to yourself, but if you fall short, you are accountable to me or your boss.”

Sure, you will not always be dead on to rule number seven each and every month; however, if you continue to not hit your goals or even your minimums, then you may unleash a slew of number sixes and now you are not establishing credibility to the company you work for.

9. Never brag. Just like rule number seven represents doing satisfactory work, going way over doesn’t give you the right to brag.

Nothing kills your trust factor within the company when you pat yourself on the back or to a prospect. Self-orientation lowers your trust even if the three variables above the line are in order.

“Pride comes before the fall” affects many different salespeople in all industries. Don’t let that happen to you.

10. Don’t sell your soul. Be real and believe in your product and yourself. What I truly mean here is that even though I believe that everyone can go door-to-door promoting the route by doing more “telling than selling,” this doesn’t give you the right to sign up bogus or borderline customers.

Rex Carrigan and I always believed that about 77 percent percent of the people we signed up would be customers. If you or your sales staff is way below this number, then they are either not properly trained or are signing up people, not customers.

The bottom line is that marketing routes with face-to-face techniques is becoming ever more critical today than before. I am contacted on a weekly basis by someone who needs sales assistance or training.

For you, the owner, the biggest concern I have is that finding the right person is not the hardest thing; keeping the right person is.

If you are struggling in this area, then I advise you to look at some of the tips above and try to assess where your staff is strong and where weak spots are, then make a decision to move forward and focus on developing your million dollar route.

In response to a couple of e-mails about all the various ways of marking your routes, I still believe that all the methods will work, but may with limited results. I have said this before and I still believe it to this day — face-to-face is still the absolute most effective, cost-minded and controllable method of building successful routes.