One of the most effective retail sales techniques known is to simply get your Customers to hold, touch, smell, hear, or actually wear your products. Marketing studies consistently prove that the more human senses you can involve in the Customer’s shopping experience, the higher the odds of completing a sale.
When a potential Customer looks at a displayed gun, mask, barrel, or tank on a wall or in a counter, it evokes only a mild mental response. Statistically, retail shoppers become far more emotionally involved when they’re gently persuaded to actually interact with an item, which automatically engages more of their senses, measurably increasing your completed sales each day!
The smoothest way to achieve interaction is to simply hand the Customer a product they’ve shown interest in, or better still, by handing them TWO similar or competing products. This assists their decision process even more by offering a Choice. By training your entire staff to just casually hand every Customer an item they’ve shown interest in, while simply saying, “Here…feel the weight of it…” or, “Try this out,” or “Go ahead, it’s okay to try this on,” your Customer automatically and immediately engages more senses.
Sense of Touch: This sense engages when a Customer touches or holds a product, feeling its weight, “feel,” and build quality, or by shooting a test-marker, air system, or motorized loader. Always gently encourage Customers to actually try on masks in a mirror, or to try on apparel in a fitting room.
Sense of Smell comes into play in many of these product encounters, delivering the exciting Paintball equivalent of the “New Car Smell”:
– the smell of new fabrics and dyes when trying on a jersey or other apparel.
– the smell of high quality plastics, polymers, foam and adhesives when trying on a mask.
– the smell of ultra-smooth gun oil emanating from a marker.
– the smell of CO2 (or compressed air) when testing a marker on a shooting range.
Sense of Sight is dramatically enhanced when a shopper can see themselves in a mirror, wearing a new mask, jersey or pants. Regarding in-store mirrors, bigger is better, and more is merrier – full length if possible! Mirrors add the impression of size to any room, and your sales of “Try-On” items will measurably increase. Mirrors in your mask area are an absolute must!
Sense of Hearing can be engaged with a small shooting range in your store or Pro Shop. Shoppers can try demo models of your fastest moving markers. They will hear the difference between barrels. For accessories like motorized hoppers, demos work great by adding the sound experience, especially noticing reductions of noise when comparing the better loaders.
NOTE: Always keep fresh batteries in demo models of your best selling markers and loaders for testing on your shooting range, to ease the buyers’ decision process and to make a good 1stimpression every time.
Sense of Taste is the one that has you wondering… since most Customers won’t eat paintballs… but you can easily keep your Customers taste buds active while they’re in the store by having a soft drink machine stocked with favorites and sports drinks, a coffee machine, popcorn machine, and sell snacks and energy bars on site. It works for Starbucks, major book sellers and dozens of major retail chains, so why not you?
Every one of these steps takes time, but Customer time spent in your store builds a sense of psychological connection, and a subtle feeling of obligation to your business. This basic step of “Value Added Service” separates the best from the rest, and the technique costs nothing but a few moments of time. Best of all, no website in the world can match it! If you’re willing to do the little extra things that your competition won’t do, you’ll always win. So here… try this on!
