EntriesWhen was the last time you walked in to a gift shop or jewelry store and there were no price tags on any of the items? Did you ask the store clerk for help or did you make the assumption that if you had to ask the price you just might not be able to afford the product and walked out? The decision to post prices is up to the owner, but this marketing coach highly recommends posting your prices when you know for sure that your prices are very competitive or the best around. Most consumers are in a hurry and even if they have the time to shop they will tell you that they like to know what the price is before they decide to buy. However, if you have a high ticketed price and you have a sales clerk who is able to close difficult sales then leaving the price tag off and allowing your clerk the opportunity to engage with the shopper is a better strategy.
Also, if you find that certain items in your store are not being sold as frequently as others you might wish to “bundle” them with other items that are more popular. A local gift shop merchant used this strategy when creating holiday gift baskets for last minute shoppers. She looked around her store and saw the items that were collecting dust and put them in attractive baskets with some of the quick sale items that everyone commonly buys. She didn’t mark-up the cost for the basket or bow or her time for assembling the holiday gift arrangement, but was thrilled to have shoppers buy the baskets for the regular price of all the items in the gift basket arrangement. She used a clever way of “bundling” items to get the end result she needed. Even if you are a service provider, consider ways that you can add value and increase sales by offering several of your services for one flat price. This is a great way to get a running start for higher sales in 2010!
All my best to your success!
~Charlene
“Success wears the Purple Diamond!”
Tags: Business Success, Pricing Products, Sales Tip
3 Comments
[...] post: WHERE IS THE PRICE TAG? | Purple Diamond Blog Comments [...]
Charlene –
Coming from the retail sales channel, your post actually reminded me of why we DID NOT post prices in our stores. The word… “Clerk”
We were in the consumer PC sales market in a destination store – when people walked into our stores, we only sold one thing, therefore they were ALL interested buyers. There was no way someone would stumble in, without intent of buying.
That aside… we found that when we put prices on the displays, our sales staff no longer engaged the customers into conversation! Without prices, the doors were wide open for mutually beneficial interation between the sales staff and customers, with an FFBQ sales process, needs assessments etc. Put a price tag on it… and the entire sales process came to a screeching halt!
Customers became “Shoppers” and our highly trained sales staff, who understood needs assessments, and how to ask all the right questions, became “Clerks” standing behind registers.
Our net profit dropped like 14-15 percentage points, since the interaction was gone.
Unfortunately, I think the days of one-to-one needs assessments are gone with the web!
Good post – it just brought back my own experiences.
Mark
Hi Mark~
Thanks for reading my blog and for posting such an excellent comment!
The thing with some sales “clerks” is that they are not real sales people. Incentives and bonus money is often what motivates a sales person to closing a deal and if they are not seeing dollar signs when customers walk in the door then they are hurting your business. When I developed my marketing coaching service I saw that was one of the biggest struggles that marketing and advertising had with closing sales…the staff or owner was not able to close a sale. I could launch an effective ad campaign and get the people in the door of a furniture store or car dealership, but without a seasoned sales staff that was hungry to move the inventory we were all sunk. When I work with a client I look at the entire process and make sure that we are poised for the best results. In the store you worked at, unless your prices were outrageously high compared to your competitors, I would have quickly recognized that you needed to either add a great incentive to the employees who sold or that you needed the incentive and me [or another sales trainer] to train them on the art of selling. And, there will always be people who were just not cut out for sales. This means that hiring sales staff requires more than just adding bodies behind the register. If you want your business to thrive you must go for excellence on every level and reward the people who work for you that are getting it done. Mark, it sounds like that problem is in the past, but if you ever find a situation like that again please feel free to connect with me. All my best to YOUR success! ~ Charlene 
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