March 8, 2010: No predetermined ideas
Hayden Honda, a single-line Indiana metric store, is twice as likely as the rest of the industry to discover the reasons why a consumer won’t make a new unit purchase.
They’re also twice as likely to differentiate the product on their showroom floor than what might be found at other dealerships, according to a national retail sales practice survey conducted by Pied Piper Management.
Kurt Hayden, owner of the dealership, believes a lot of that success in those key retail sales areas can be attributed to a single point: the customer, rather than the salesperson, decides on the unit of purchase.
“We tend to ask more questions and find out what the consumer expects or wants from his bike and direct them to that,” he said. “Our salesman won’t sell a bike just because we want to get rid of it.”
Hayden says he has encountered other sales approaches at industry seminars that run counter to the store’s practice. In fact, the latest seminar he attended preached the idea of “finding out how much the customer has to spend and then find the bike that’s less expensive than that and that way you can sell a bunch of extras with the bike.
“I’m thinking well, yes and no,” Hayden said. “Find out what bike he wants and then hopefully you can get him the bike he wants. If not, find him a bike he can afford. I think that might be why we score high in a lot of things because the salesman doesn’t have predetermined ideas of what he should sell the customer.”
