Your Ultimate Guide to Running a Smooth & Streamlined Pool ... · YOUR ULTIMATE GUIE TO RUNNING A SMOOTH & STREAMLINE POOL & SPA BUSINESS 3 Create Optimal Conditions for an Upsell

Your Ultimate Guide to Running a Smooth & Streamlined Pool & Spa Business

YOUR ULTIMATE GUIDE TO RUNNING A SMOOTH& STREAMLINED POOL & SPA BUSINESS 2

Table of Contents

Quickly Grow Your Bottom Line with Upselling

• Quickly Grow Your Bottom Line with Upselling

• Train and Motivate Staff to Upsell

• Gain Loyalty By Improving Your Customer Experience

• Streamline and Automate Your Inventory Control

• Save Money By Optimizing Your Service Logistics

As a business owner, your plate is always full. From managing inventory to overseeing employees, there are never enough hours in the day to completely clear that plate.

What if you had the necessary tools to run your business more effectively and efficiently? Time is money, and you can save both with the right tools and implementation.

The team at RB Retail & Service Solutions is here to share some practical advice in this guide for tailoring your in-store customer experience increasing client retention and ROI. Let’s get started.

As someone in the retail industry, upselling likely isn’t a new concept for you. When executed properly, upselling will deepen your relationships with customers. A good upsell will make a customer feel like you are looking out for their best interest. Here are a few tips for practicing upselling that’s impactful and profitable.


Create Optimal Conditions for an Upsell

Picture this:

Upselling to your current clientele is easier than marketing to new customers. The shoppers in your store are there to purchase items from you because they know you. They trust the quality of your products and the expertise of your employees. These are going to be the easiest customers for you to make money from because they’re already primed for the sale.

Customers are more likely to visit a familiar establishment and buy familiar products. Establishing trust and good customer relationships is the foundation of convincing customers to buy a more expensive product or even a different product entirely.

A customer walks into your store looking for a new filtering system.

You learn from pulling up their customer profile that they have a 30,000-gallon inground pool, which tells you what filtering system they need. As soon as that filtering system is scanned into the POS to sell, an alert can be displayed for the cashier that an extra cartridge or new hoses are recommended when purchasing this filtering system. The cashier can suggest those items as an up-sell.

Naturally, the customer would be more willing to purchase the items they may not have considered before when they are being recommended by an expert. Software that prompts the cashier also eliminates the time and effort it would take to train every cashier on an extensive list of recommended companion items.

1:


Keep Offers Relevant

Sell Solutions,Not Services

To increase your chances of success, upsell a service or product that’s related to the customer’s needs. For example, if someone is looking for pool chemicals, they might be receptive to being offered water testing supplies or filter equipment as a supplemental purchase.

People purchase products and services to solve their existing problems. A great way to identify luxury sale options is to identify the most common needs among your customers.

Your clients purchase filters because they need clean pool & spa water, but maybe they could save on filters by purchasing a more efficient pump, or perhaps a weekly cleaning service. Using a customer’s history can give you great insight into the items they might be willing to purchase or the service they might want to invest in.

2:

3:


Explain the Benefits4:Knowledge is power, so empower your customers with facts about your products. Customers are 18 times more likely to purchase from you when they know they will gain something from that product or service.

• Will it save them time or money? • Does it come with a warranty guarantee? • What about the ease of an all-in-one solution?

Prove what you’re offering is going to benefit them in some way, and they’ll be much more likely to hand over their hard-earned money.

Bonus Tip:Use Sophisticated Software

If a customer comes in with a specific problem to solve (i.e. pink slime), your staff should print off a tip sheet to show them step by step how to treat that problem. RB Retail & Service Solutions users can print tip sheets directly from the system, but anyone can use tip sheets to assist with sales. These tip sheets can be used to suggest chemicals to treat water problems a customer is having. You can even create kits of products with the tip sheet attached. Not only is it helpful for the customer, but it’s also a great sales tactic! You can use these tip sheets to leverage your expertise and encourage upsells even further.


Train and Motivate Staff to Upsell

Training and motivating your staff to upsell well can skyrocket your profit margin and drastically expand your bottom line. Take these steps to prepare and motivate your staff to upsell.

The first key to upselling is understanding what your customers are thinking so you can implement a successful strategy for your staff. For example, when your employee understands the differences among the various brands of chlorine you carry, they might have the confidence and capability to recommend a more profitable brand when they are asked for advice during rush hour.

In order for your staff to upsell effectively, they need to know and understand your products so they can discuss and recommend them with ease.

Studies show that learning is best done when sessions are short and spaced a day or so apart. Train your staff incrementally, and incorporate fun games and activities to help retention.

Additionally, prepping your staff with small but basic social standards such as a clean and professional dress code, speaking with a positive attitude, and smiling go a long way toward earning the trust of customers.

Understand Your Customer

Know Your Products

Focus on the Short and Sweet

1:

2:

3:


In order for your employees to feel comfortable upselling, it’s important for them to practice. The more they practice role-playing with each other, the more comfortable they will be in the store dealing with clients.

Your staff has to be confident and excited about what they are selling in order to generate that same excitement within the customer. Employees that show hesitation can make a consumer wary or suspicious of what they are being sold. Prep them on how to deal with objections so they remain steady and controlled when pressed with questions.

Software that associates items, tracks inventory locations, and allows communication between multiple locations can make a big difference to an employee trying to make a sale.

Giving your employees the tools they need to convince a customer to take the upsell is critical to maximizing your profit per sale.

A great way to encourage your staff to upsell is to create incentives for good work or high sales. Playing sales games is a fun way to motivate your staff to go the extra mile. Keep track of how much they sell daily, weekly, or monthly.

Good software should be able to handle this easily, but there are many manual methods of keeping track of sales, including an Excel sheet or Word document. The downside to manual methods is that it is difficult to run reports and can be more time-consuming.

Practice, Practice, Practice

Provide Tools

Offer Employee Incentives

4:

5:

6:


When people receive something they usually feel a natural need to give something back in return. Samples also give the customer something tangible to hold, and once people are able to hold on to something tangible, we tend to want to keep it.

Provide Product Samples7:

Bonus Tip:Extend the SpendThe longer your customers are in your store, the more likely they are to spend more money. Encourage your staff to make meaningful connections with your shoppers. Ask your customers questions and learn about their pool needs.


Gain Loyalty By Improving Your Customer Experience

Tailor the In-Store Experience

Make Them Feel Valued

Over half of consumers are willing to pay a higher price for a more valuable experience. You can increase the value of their experience by tailoring your pitch to the customer. Below are a few ways to do this:

People love experiencing personalization based on what they need and want. When customers feel important, they are more likely to be repeat purchasers. A couple incentives you can launch to make your customers feel more valued are:

• Hold a “pick your own sale item” promotion.

• Implement a loyalty program so they get rewarded for shopping with you.

RB Retail & Service Solutions offers a comprehensive loyalty program that is designed to reward recurring customers who purchase items from your business. It drives customers to earn cents per every dollar spent on inventory items and allows them to use the money earned as payment on future transactions.


Retailers with generous return policies are often held in high regard, because knowing hassle-free returns is an option feels invaluable to shoppers. Customers are more likely to buy when they have the peace of mind that they can return an item if they feel dissatisfied. That being said, you might consider implementing policies like:

• No time limit on returns• No need for a receipt with a return• Free shipping on returns

The easier you can make a customer’s life, the happier they will be.

Let customers skip the lineNobody likes to wait in line. You can keep your checkout lines moving faster with a mobile option. By implementing mobile shopping and checkout in your store with a tablet, an associate can scan merchandise, process payments, and email customers their receipts. The better, faster service you supply, the more delighted your customers will be.

Alert customers via textWe now offer a “send text message” option to send to customers, which allows you to send them text alerts for service notifications during the date they have scheduled service. With this feature, your team will have the option to select a pre-set body to include for those text messages and the ability to add a customized message on the fly.

Make Their Lives Easier

Go Mobile


Other Mobile Features to Offer:Job Images: Add images before, during, and after a job is completed for better organization and optimization.Work Performed Images: Add images to specifically pinpoint work done for individualized tasks so customers can see examples of your results.

Employee Pictures: Include employee pictures to demonstrate to customers who completed the work done for them.

Features Information: Create features for pools, spas, and other areas where work can be completed and include various criteria including volumes, sizes, chemical types, and more.

Inventory Part Images: View images associated with available inventory. This can be beneficial when completing physical inventory, because you know you have selected the correct part when scanning and entering quantities.

Business today is fast-paced. The more you can do to gain control of your inventory, the more you can maintain order in your store. Excessive inventory causes poor cash flow, year-end tax costs, disorganization, and (often) a loss of money. We offer tools that can help you manage cycle counts, tighten logistics, and give you a renewed sense of control over your inventory.

Because customers today have multiple options for shopping for pool supplies, it’s imperative to have the item they seek on hand. Disappointed customers will shop elsewhere, and since customers thrive on familiarity, they are unlikely to return to your store. Proper inventory management is the solution to that situation.

Streamline and Automate Your Inventory Control


How RB Helps Automate Inventory Control

• Activity Reports: If you start with accurate inventory and maintain that inventory with software, then you are well on your way to taking control of your stock. With our accurate inventory, the computer can alert you when it’s time to re-order stock. Our activity reports also take the guesswork out of early buy ordering.

• Reorder Reports: Schemes reports allow you to set up items with minimum/maximum quantities. If your stock goes below that minimum, our reporter report will tell you that you need to reorder.

The calculations in our software are smart, so if you have an item committed to a customer (i.e. they order it every month), the software reduces that from the stock quantity. Similarly, if a Purchase Order hasn’t been received, it’s included in the total.

You can also set up monthly percentages for your products. If you want more pool cleaning products in the spring, then you can set up decreasing percentages each month to ensure you have the correct amount on hand when reordering. Likewise, if you have a disparity in the Accounts Payable, you can print an AP Discrepancy Report.

With RB Retail & Service Solutions, you can even organize and print inventory reports by revenue center, department, category, vendor, warehouse, or other criteria.


Save Money By Optimizing Your Service Logistics

The Benefits of Route Optimization and Schedule

The Route Optimization and Schedule abilities in our software make life easier for your technicians. These abilities also assist with tracking labor and parts for billing and automatically scheduling recurring service.

With the route optimization feature in our software, you can generate itineraries for your service techs each day that take them on the most efficient travel route. This saves your company time and fuel. You can also send the addresses to a mapping system that can create a physical map a tech can view.

After they have returned to the office, barcodes on the itinerary make it easy to transfer labor and parts in your open service order in your system if you are not utilizing a mobile app.

Whether you are adding a one-time repair, delivery, sales call, or onsite inspection appointment to the schedule, you can do that from inside sales order. It’s easy to choose the type of service, requested day, and desired staff for the project.

With our software, you are also able to create recurring services. For example, if you go to a home for a pool cleaning once a week, you can put in the parameters for how often you do it, and you can have it automatically renew on the schedule each week.

Route Optimization

Scheduled Sales


Once you’ve followed those steps, you can learn a lot from the data.

1. Track labor and associated expenses for each stage of the job. 2. Track the usage tax per job and per month or within a given time

period. 3. Follow your actual expenses versus the budget. 4. View the estimated costs remaining, forecast at completion, cost

variances, and the following as you move through a job.

These capabilities will all make your Accountant’s job significantly easier.

In the Construction section of our software, you can create estimates for customers, then turn those quotes into a contract. Just answer some prompted questions and the contract will be automatically generated with the customer’s customized information.

You can also manage any project through our built-in progress management system that shows the different stages of each project, any subcontractors you’re working with, and how much each line item costs.

Progress Management works hand in hand with the scheduler to schedule appointments and daily jobs quickly and easily. Progress Management will track permit numbers and other important notes and information necessary for each job. Set up your own customized job stages and track all costs including inventory, labor, and expenses for each stage of a job in the Job Costing module.

Set dependencies to ensure that stages of the job are never scheduled out of sequence and instantly print reports of all jobs that have an open or completed status. Reports can print for one job or all jobs.

Always stay informed as to what the physical status of your jobs are and have a record of who, what, where, and when.

Job Progress Management

Whether you are considering, are new to, or are an experienced user of RB Retail & Service Solutions, we hope that this advice has helped you feel equipped to run a smooth & streamlined pool & spa business.

If you have any questions about our software or want to ensure that you are utilizing it to the fullest extent, contact us anytime.

Call Now: (866) 933-9099

https://www.rbretailandservicesolutions.com/

https://www.rbretailandservicesolutions.com/

Documents

Your Ultimate Guide to Running a Smooth & Streamlined Pool ... · YOUR ULTIMATE GUIE TO RUNNING A SMOOTH & STREAMLINE POOL & SPA BUSINESS 3 Create Optimal Conditions for an Upsell