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Designers are often ‘self-employed’. This means that although
they generally only work on behalf of the one organisation, with
the money they earn, they have to pay their own expenses and organise
their own taxes. The ‘highs’ of the job are therefore very high
– a designer can visit a house for three hours and in that period
earn himself £1000 in commission. In that scenario just imagine
the designer walking slowly out of your door, turning around the
corner… and just out of your sight running down the next street
in glee with the signed contract in his hands!
Apart from
having the increased pressure of working on a commission only
basis, being self-employed gives the designer an additional incentive
to have to get the sale.
 Quite
often a designer has travelled over 100 miles just to see
you.
Around 20%
of the time a designer will have travelled all the way to visit
a customer and knocked on the door only to be greeted with no
answer. Can you imagine having to cope with such lows! However
what this does mean is when the designer does find himself with
a reasonable chance of ‘converting a sale’, he’ll give it his
best shot. That’s why when presented with a reasonable selling
opportunity many designers ‘pushy’.
The
simple fact is that it just doesn’t pay for designers to go back
and visit customers more than once.
Many
people say that they’ll ‘consider’ what a designer has proposed
– but they simply don’t want to say ‘no’ to his face.
When
it comes down to making a decision, they’d rather do it by telephone.
This isn’t any good to the self-employed designer. He’d have to
come back to the customer and get the contract signed. Even then,
until the contract is signed it’s by no means guaranteed.
Put
simply, it isn’t worth a
designer visiting a customer again when the other option is to
‘go for broke’ the first time and still have
plenty more appointments in reserve.
There is one
final reason why a designer is ‘pushy’. In a lot of
kitchen companies, designers won’t earn a penny from a sale
unless the kitchen is sold on the first visit. Harsh? Possibly.
But it gives the designer that ‘go for broke’ mentality.
At least the designer isn’t stuck in limbo, wondering if
he might just get a sale from a customer ringing back. The reality
for the kitchen companies is that most customers don’t.
Most customers are too polite to say to a designer directly, “I’m
not too happy with your design or your price – so I’m
not going to buy your kitchen.” This is why kitchen
have been much more successful by introducing the ‘vulture
squad’.
Vultures are
of course birds of prey, which are reputed to gather with others
in anticipation of a death. Nobody likes vultures. Kitchen designers
don’t like the vulture squad.
The vulture
squad was designed by kitchen companies to take advantage of the
scraps left by designers.
Naturally, as it is much
more cost effective to utilise self-employed designers,
not all designers are going to offer the same quality of service
to both the kitchen company and the customer.
Therefore,
a decision was made by many companies to ‘back up’ the effort
made by its designers with an extra sales team. This team have
the responsibility of gaining a ‘second bite of the cherry’. If
the designer has been poor in creating a ‘saleable design’ or
ineffective in ‘closing the sale’, then somebody else will give
the prospective customer another phone call to try and gain his
or her business. A typical call to such a potential customer could
begin, “I’ve been chatting to our trade department and as we’re
delivering kitchens in your style within your area, we’d be able
to save you an additional 10%.”
Now you know why kitchen designers can be pushy!
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