So recently on our WhizBang retailers Facebook group, someone commented that she’s seen a big uptick in showrooming and several people jumped on and said they saw the same thing. So let’s talk about that. First, let’s define showrooming.

Showrooming is when someone comes into your store, looks at your merchandise, checks it out, finds a price, often will take a picture of it, and then leave to go try to find a better price online.

And, you know, it can be incredibly frustrating, especially if you help fit somebody or really walk them through the features and benefits. You know, you give them the kind of experience that you want to give them as a local independent brick and mortar store. But then you feel violated when they clearly want the thing but clearly are going to look someplace else. It’s frustrating. I get it. So let’s talk about how we combat it. The first thing to understand and the first part of it is a mindset piece.

And the mindset piece is the shift from doggone it. This person is taking advantage of me to, hey, this person is in my store. He or she wants to buy this thing. Therefore, I’m going to sell it to them.

Right? So the shift goes from frustration with them to making them into a challenge. So they’re in your store. They want to buy.

The first thing to think about is, are you and your team skilled sales people?

So if your team members are only good, kind, helpful, friendly people, what are they gonna do? They’re going to give that showroomer all of the information they need to make a decision, and then they’re going to let them leave. If yours you and your salespeople are skilled, what you’re going to do is and what they are going to do is continuously ask good questions to, close the sale. You know, closing the sale is a skill. And until someone has been taught to close the sale, they’re not going to close effectively.

You know, the simplest close is to say, would you like that? So let’s go let’s go through the whole selling process here. Right? So first of all, the first step in the six steps to the perfect purchase is greetings.

And so the greeting, the welcome and the greeting is really a function of you getting to know that customer. That customer coming to understand that you’re on the same team. We call them warm words of welcome. But then after you have gotten into a conversation, then it becomes about asking good questions, questioning and listening.

You know, and questioning and listening is what separates the men from the boys and the women from the girls. And a good salesperson asks lots and lots and lots of questions. And every time a good question is asked and answered, the the gap between what they want and them being willing to buy it from you gets closed. And when you’ve closed the gap to the place where you know it’s perfect, they know it’s perfect, you know that they know it’s perfect, then the question the closing question becomes simple. Then the closing question becomes something like, how would you like to pay for this?

Would you like it? You know, just asking them. Is it time for you to buy this thing? But if you’re not skilled, if you don’t get into the conversation skillfully, and you don’t ask good questions, and you don’t know how to close, when that person, when that show rumor has gotten what they want from you, they’ll just leave and you’ve got no recourse. So selling skills is such an important part of combating showrooming.

The next part of this conversation is what we call ADD.

ADD is called is an acronym for ask, discuss, decide. And if you’re having a showrooming problem in your store, you want to bring your team together and say, look, this is a problem we’re having. What can we do? What do you think we should do? And get your team to buy into the conversation.

Make it part of your company’s conversation for as long as it takes to solve the problem. Because my guess is, if you’ve got, let’s just say, ten team members that five of them don’t get showroomed very often and five of them do get showroomed. What does it mean? It means that the five that aren’t the the five that are actually closing the sales are doing something different. And so when you ADD a problem with your team, the answers, the solutions become a lot more evident.

So the third thing that I’m going to recommend, and this might be a little bit controversial, is this, have a price match.

And what do I mean by that? I mean that if somebody comes in and you get to the end of the sales process and they’re still clearly going to leave, you just say to them, look, we will match any price. So if you want if you need to go home and find the lowest price, don’t buy it online. Come back here. We’ve had we have a relationship.

I’ve helped you out. We’re friends now. We’re friendly.

And what you will find is that when you have a low price match and you present that to a customer, nine times out of ten, they’re going to buy from you right there. Right? Cause what you’re doing is you’re showing confidence in the fairness of your price. Ensure there is always going to be a couple of people who are going to shop somewhere else to save three pennies.

But if you, you know, if if you present it that way, we’ve been on the same team. I’ve been helping you. I really want you to have this thing, but I really want you to buy it from me. And if you find it at a lower price someplace else, I’ll match that price.

What you’re going to find is that most people are going to buy from you. And that’s what you want, right? You just want them to buy from you. And I would suggest to you that you should wrap, you would prefer to get a sale at a small discount rather than lose the sale altogether.

So that is that, three different strategies to fight showrooming. I hope that you found them helpful. If you have any strategies that I haven’t touched on that everybody should know about, please put them down in the comments below. I’m Bob Negen, and we’ll see you next week.