.jpg)
Kitchen Remodeling | 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 organization, with the money they earn, they
have to pay their own expenses and organize 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 traveled over 100 miles just to
see you.
Around
20% of the time a kitchen remodeling designer will have traveled 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 the kitchen has 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 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 utilize 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 has 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 the kitchen
designers can be pushy!
