Kitchen
Secret #8
Why do Kitchen
Designers want a sale 'on the night'?
Kitchen 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 kitchen remodeling 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
kitchen remodeling 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 remodeling 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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