Selling Furniture

The other skills area which is interesting is sales enhancement. Basically this means up-selling and more-selling by giving training to the sales force. This sales force can be either in a shop or they can travel from client to client. This does not matter, as the skills-set is always the same.

One needs to train them the "5 steps of selling", how to ask what kind of questions, closing techniques, preparation and "post"paration systems (post-paration as "what to do after a sales call?"), etc. Even though everybody talks about relationship-based selling these days, which is different to the usual selling skills, but on that commodity goods level, the usual skills-set is more than fine and appropriate. I will go into more detail when I am talking about my first project as project manager where I managed a sales programme.

So, my next project was back to the old one, the furniture retailer with 50 shops around Germany. We developed a selling skills model for them, trained it, and followed up on the newly learned techniques with coaching, mystery shoppers, audits, etc.

The project closed prematurely. The weekly invoice was too high to bear for the client. I think they tried to do it themselves with the task forces we trained. A few months later after the project has been stopped the company went bust and into administration. It does not exist anymore.

For me it was a good project as I learned everything about selling.