How to make the festive season a success

CEO of the PHAB Standard, Nergish Wadia-Austin answers your questions, about the festive period. Because of the increased foot-fall, how do I maximise customer spend without increasing the time our customers spend in the salon at Christmas? The trick is to thoroughly script the salon's festive consultation. Having added precise, short questions about the client’s festive shopping/gift giving needs and having taught it to all team members, is where success lies! Of course, if the manager doesn’t listen in to ensure that each customer is being asked those questions, the sales opportunity is lost. When a customer has pre-booked their festive hair appointment, sometimes months in advance, they turn up in the throes of their festive period chores. The act of asking the right questions during their visit, is merely a gesture of help. The salon is often the perfect place to solve difficult gift-giving dilemmas via gift vouchers, services, product solutions and gadgets/tools. I always appear to have overbought Christmas packages when I really was very conservative in my spend, why is that? In my experience, I find that managers are almost having a stab in the dark when buying their Christmas gift packages from their manufacturers/suppliers. When buying, managers make the mistake of guessing rather than looking at their track records. The KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are the holy grail of information. If they just looked at their last three years of KPI trends, they can move from guessing to decision making immediately. Useful KPIs will be foot-fall in October, November, December for the salon and for individual productive staff. Three top-selling services in October, November, December of the last three years. This is just the starting point. Based on just this basic information, managers have a guide of how many people the salon can help with their gift giving in the three months of the festive period. Then mangers can decide what percentage of the number of customers they are going to help with their gifts and that sets the target for the year. How do I get rid of all the extra Christmas stock in the New Year? If you follow the guidance in answers one and two above, you are more likely to have run out of stock than be stuck with any in January/February. Buying stock for the festive period should not be a knee jerk reaction to a sales person's visit but rather a calculated estimation of what you know you can sell through in a very busy three-month period. None of this advice will help if the manager does not apportion individual targets to the stylists, colourists and the reception team. Why do some of my staff find it hard to sell the seasonal gifts? Because they haven’t been given a scripted, specific festive consultation. Or possibly, the manager has not checked that they have bothered to learn it. Lastly, they may have the consultation and have learnt it but are not bothering to use it. At the end of every night during the months of October, November and December, the manager needs to check who is hitting their retail targets and who isn’t. The next day they need to make active listening time for the people who are not hitting their retail targets to see if the scripted festive consultation is in fact being used. What do I do with all that heavy foot-fall at Christmas and utilise it in the slower trading months of January and February? Past KPI trends for January and February will be very helpful here. Designing an offer around promoting the newest, least booked services the salon has to offer is best at this time. Making them a very attractive offer to try these new super services and perhaps offering them an opportunity of bringing a friend or family member to try them at the same time will most definitely make the new services more popular but will also introduce a whole bunch of new customers to the salon. Most importantly gives the salon a real buzz during its slowest months.   To access the new H&B Business Helpline for Managers, you can call: +44 (0)208 840 9070. Alternatively, you can book your private one-to-one telephone, Skype or FaceTime consultation at www.phabstandard.com Image: Shutterstock