Networking Tips for the Flooring Retailer and Flooring Vendor

When it comes to flooring, there’s not a one-size-fits-all for each customer. There are various options available to suit each customer’s taste, style, needs, and budget. 

Think outside the box and expand your flooring business by reaching out to new customers (consider different types you may have never thought of such as business owners) to increase sales and create a reliable brand people trust.

There are many ways to reach potential customers. Through online marketing, direct mail, and cold calling — you can grow your flooring business as quickly as you want. 

Networking with those in the construction or design industry can lead to multiple jobs and enhance your reputation for creating quality flooring for residential and business customers.

Think about it, homes, businesses, schools, and pretty much every building, new or old, need flooring. The options for networking are endless! Other traditional, potential networking partners for a flooring company include:

• Interior designers
• Building owners
• Home contractors

Flooring vendors can find several networking opportunities by contacts with various retail stores. Big box stores can be lucrative but don’t forget about local stores and local contracting companies either! 

Whether you are a flooring retailer or flooring vendor, here are some tips to help promote your business and products!

1. Build a website for your flooring business that includes business contact information, description of flooring services and installation procedures, types of flooring, customer testimonials, and before and after pictures of recent jobs. 

2. SEO Search engine optimization is a great way to improve your website’s search engine rankings and drive more traffic to your homepage. However, SEO is not an exact science and it’s definitely not a quick process. Many factors influence these rankings. Try writing original content (blogs, articles, etc.) about your products or craft, and post them on your website. Make sure to include keywords that mention flooring or flooring terms in each post. Think of this as a long-term tactic.

3. Take high-quality photographs of your work. Show potential and current customers precisely what you can do with professional-quality images of each job. Show before and after pictures and pictures of different products showcasing different types of flooring and projects. 

3. Utilize LinkedIn. Use your actual photo, complete all the details of your profile, and of course, link to your company page. 

4. Join flooring, contracting, residential, and commercial building associations. Attend networking events that you know home contractors or related organizations may be present. Don’t expect to get a sale–this is a time to get to know others and introduce yourself!

5. Ask for referrals. Satisfied customers can and will provide you with solid leads. Offer them a discount on future jobs, or thank you gift to encourage referrals. 

By successfully networking, you can lay a solid foundation for your flooring business! And while you’re at it, check out VendorPriceBook.com — the ultimate tool for looking up flooring pricing and inventory from your preferred flooring supplier.

Five Ways to Improve Customer Service at your Flooring Business

There’s an old saying in the business world: the customer is always right. Now, we all know that isn’t actually true (especially in specialized industries like flooring), but the idea has become accepted by both businesses and customers across the globe.

The truth of the matter is this: the customer isn’t always right, but your customer service should make them FEEL like they are. Here are a few tips to help you improve your customer service in your flooring showroom.

Give Your Customers Information

There is nothing more irritating to a customer than a sales associate who hovers and follows them around the showroom. Similarly, there is nothing more irritating to an employee than customers who bombard them with a million questions. One way to give everyone the space they need (and avoid terse interactions that make everyone uncomfortable) is to give your customers the important info up front.

Post signs around your store with information about pricing. Fill your website with helpful blogs and easy to find FAQs (these can also boost your ranking on search engines). If your customers can find key info themselves, they’ll feel like that have more power over their sales experience — and that is always a positive.

Set The Mood

When customers don’t feel comfortable with a shopping experience (as they usually don’t when making big purchases like flooring), they tend to want to keep the experience short and sweet. Of course, we know that finding the right flooring takes time — so it’s up to us to make the process as pleasant as possible.

Choose pleasant overhead music to play in your store. Use aromatherapy to create a comfortable and calming environment. These little tricks can ease the stress of shopping and help your customers enjoy the experience a little bit more.

Use Associates Appropriately

A great sales associate is like seasoning in a recipe: they amplify everything that’s great about the experience and take it to the next level. However, it is possible to “over-season” a customer shopping experience, and that can leave a bad taste in their mouth.

Make sure your sales associates are well trained, knowledgeable, and friendly — but also, make sure they know when to let a customer have some space. Remember that good customer service is about giving the customer what they want (not securing a sale), so make sure your sales team knows how to read the situation and respond appropriately.

Get Social

In today’s world, social media is an invaluable form of marketing. The right viral tweet or five-star Yelp review can really help your business — and a one-star review can do incredible damage.

Make sure you are active on your business’s social media pages. This might mean posting about sales or new floor that’s arrived in the store, or it might mean responding to reviewers who gave you poor reviews (however, when you respond to those reviewers ALWAYS remain professional). If you are engaging with your audience online, you will have a clearer idea of what they want and expect from your business.

Ask for Feedback

Finally, let’s go back to our old adage, “The customer is always right.” One great way to provide customer service is to lean into that belief and simply ask your customers for their feedback. Ask them to take a survey about your store online. Make it easy for them to contact you with questions or comments, and respond to these messages promptly. Simply giving your customers a voice will make them feel like you care — and that’s something everyone appreciates.

Ultimately, the customer service experience is about making your customers feel valuable. If you prove that you value their time, their personal space, and their opinions, they are sure to value your product all the more.

Bonus Tip: Expedite the Process

The VendorPriceBook Mobile app is coming soon and purchase ordering is now available!

The system you know and love is getting an upgrade. Now with VendorPriceBook, you will be able to use our mobile app right on the showroom floor. No more running around, leafing through pages or searching spreadsheets for (potentially outdated) pricing and inventory levels. NO MORE MAKING YOUR CUSTOMERS WAIT LONGER THAN THEY SHOULD. Stay tuned for news on our upcoming mobile app release.

How to Offer a Virtual Flooring Consultation

Offering convenience and flexibility is one of the best ways to cater to your clientele, especially when it comes to complex home projects. By providing virtual consultations, customers can meet with you and your dedicated flooring team from the comfort of their own homes. You can help them realize their decor design and style while offering advice regarding which products look best in their homes.

From the first steps of choosing new flooring to having it installed, customers appreciate guidance throughout the process.

Replacing floors can be daunting and overwhelming, but you can keep the process from being stressful. You can help your clients research and settle on a plan so they can get the floor they want.

Encourage your customers to look at every available flooring. This is the time when they can let their imaginations run wild while also taking stock of what they want their budget and design to look like. Once they have a good idea of how they want their flooring to look, you can start helping them figure out how to achieve their dreams.

Your virtual flooring consultation gives your clients the space to figure out their price range that fits perfectly with their needs.

Help Your Customers Upgrade Their Home

Offering virtual flooring consultations keeps home improvements safe and convenient. They can easily choose from your extensive assortment of flooring choices, including tile, hardwood, carpet, and more. If they are considered with sanitary issues with flooring, don’t forget to mention any of your antimicrobial options.

Once they have decided on a floor style they would like to visualize, the next step is to take a picture of the room they would like to improve and simply show it to you over the web meeting. They can even bring you to their room during the video call! The consultant will be able to make some quick recommendations or use the photo and later assist with using a visualization software to help the customer see all the possibilities unfold before their very eyes with a realistic conception of how their new floor might appear.

Would You Prefer to Stay Home? You Can Still Shop for New Floors

Changes in the world have inspired us to rethink how we should approach how we stay connected with clients while showcasing our products. Virtual flooring consultation allows retailers to do a virtual consultation via zoom or phone at any time convenient to customers.

You want to demonstrate that you work hard to keep your customers and their families as safe as possible. We all face the same challenges, but we work every day to adapt and improve, so it’s important to provide this option to consumers.

Plus, it makes it easier for customers to simply book an online or phone appointment so you can offer insights for their projects and offer solutions.

If you want to go one step further in enhancing customer service, you have to think about getting them the most up-to-date pricing and availability for what they want. VendorPriceBook makes this easy by providing flooring suppliers and retailers a cloud-based application for instant communication. No more flipping through pages, searching through emails – VendorPriceBook is here to help stop the chaos and streamline communication.

5 Simple Ways to Grow Your Flooring Business on Social Media

In the late ‘90s and early 2000s, social media was pure entertainment. It was a place for kids to connect with their peers, for fans of TV shows to speculate on future episodes together. These things still take place on social media sites today, but these platforms also have one other major purpose…

Today, social media is an opportunity to promote your business.

If you use social media properly, you can have countless people all over the world checking out your flooring business. But how do you do it? Here are a few easy tips to help you grow your business.

Choose Your Platforms Carefully

First things first: if you’re going to promote your flooring business on social media, you need to choose the right platform. There are a lot of social media sites out there, from Facebook and Twitter to Reddit and Quora. It might be tempting to take a “shotgun approach” and use every single platform to promote your company, but trust us — that’s not the way to go.

Instead, take a little time to review your customer demographics. How old is your average customer? Are they handy DIY-ers? Do they want a specific aesthetic from their home decor? The answers to these questions will help you determine which social media platforms are most likely to catch their eye. Find those platforms, and focus your energy on boosting your business there.

Choose the right social media platform

Turn Instagram into Your Portfolio

Flooring is a visual industry. Your customers work with you because they want beautiful flooring in their space, and they know you can deliver. But how do they know? It’s likely they saw samples of your work — and now, you can show off your projects whenever you want. 

Instagram is a great platform for a flooring business because it gives you the opportunity to present your work to all your followers in real-time. Your feed becomes an ever-updating portfolio, and potential customers can quickly and easily see just what you can do.

Use Stories to Show Off Your Personality

Sometimes, customers will work with a company simply because they like them (and they do good work). You and your team probably have a good time on the job site, so why not show off your professionalism and personality all while creating some online content?

Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok are all social media sites that allow users to create “stories,” or short videos for their followers. With these stories, you can introduce clients to your team, show off flooring jobs in progress, and generally charm viewers with your sparkling personality! This way, they’ll remember you when it’s time to do their flooring.

Keep Your Feed Current

We’ve all seen “dead” sites or profiles before. These are websites or social media pages that have gone dark, where no one has posted in months or even years. When this happens, users tend to think that something’s gone wrong for the person or the company behind the page. They may even imagine that you’ve gone out of business!

We understand that posting online isn’t second nature for everyone (especially not when you have a big flooring project underway). But keeping your social media feed up to date with regular content will help keep your company at the top of your client’s minds — and that’s good for your bottom line!

Engage with Your Followers

Finally, it’s highly important that you remember the reason social media was founded in the first place: to connect with people.

If someone comments on your Instagram post saying that your flooring looks great, comment back and thank them! If you write a Medium guest blog on types of flooring that are best for DIY projects, answer people’s questions in the comments. These small moments where you connect with a follower, reader, or viewer not only make you seem more personable (aka easy to work with should they need some flooring done), but they can also help you close a deal with a potential customer that’s on the fence.

With these tips, your social media profile can become more than just a way to entertain yourself in your down time. Instead, it can be an asset to your business!

Of course, the easiest way to streamline your flooring business so it’s poised for success, is through investing in technology that will create efficient communication between suppliers and retailers. VendorPriceBook.com aims to solve that bottleneck that retailers have when it comes to looking up pricing and inventory for their clients. VendorPriceBook takes the paper out of the conventional pricebooks, as well as unorganized computer files, so everything is seamlessly conducted online and pricing and inventory is available at your fingertips, instantly.

VendorPriceBook is the efficient way to communicate between vendors and retailers in the flooring industry

How To Use Yelp for your Flooring Business

A flooring business is multi-faceted just like any other retail business. You have to deal with your suppliers, your customers, and your employees. In today’s world of Amazon, smart phones and social media galore, customers have a huge amount of leverage when it comes to their shopping choices. It literally hasn’t been easier for a consumer to conduct research and purchase items for their home renovation or remodeling…all from the comfort of their home. Of course, we know it’s imperative for a customer to physically come and see a flooring product before actually purchasing, so internet can take second place to an actual brick and mortar store. So how do they even choose which home flooring store to visit?

No doubt you’ve took to the internet to find reviews for a new restaurant you wanted to try out. Or perhaps you “Googled” the name of the dentistry you were considering switching over to. Online reviews are a major factor when it comes to buying decisions and Yelp is the king of this space.

Are you leveraging your Yelp profile? Here are a few easy tips to make sure you’re getting visits and phone calls your flooring business needs to thrive in this competitive market:

1. Claim your profile: don’t have a Yelp page already up? It’s extremely simple to claim your business. Do this now and then go on to the next steps.
2. Photos, photos and more photos: One or two photos of your store isn’t going to cut it. Be sure to include multiple photos of your exterior, interior and of specific products. Ensure you are adding descriptions to the photos as well with detailed and relevant captions.
3. Fill out as much information as possible: that includes your website, company history, hours of operation, credit card acceptance, amenities and highlights.
4. Respond and thank: yes, even if you get a great review, be sure to thank your customer. For negative reviews, take time to review their comment, learn from it, and write a polite and public comment. Allow them to see you understand their concern and would like to rectify the problem as fit.

If you can complete the above four tasks, you’re on the right track. Make your Yelp page a lead magnet!

If you find your customers complain about inventory or lack of clarity in pricing, you definitely want to check out VendorPriceBook.com which is a cloud-based app that allows retailers to instantly look up flooring pricing and inventory.

Is your Flooring Business Being Efficient?

A business is a multi-faceted animal that has multiple systems and processes in place to make it work. At a high-level, managerial standpoint, it is crucial to take step back to see if the systems in place are not just merely chugging along, but actually working efficiently.

When it comes to the flooring industry, it is no different. From the moment a new home owner walks onto a retailer’s showroom floor, there’s an entire workflow that is built to support that single customer. Think about it—in order to serve that one customer, a retailer must have already have a relationship with their vendors that supply them with stone, wood, carpet, vinyl, tile, laminate—they send them samples and when a customer orders, the retailer in turn may have to order a wholesale order.

So the eager customer comes to a flooring retailer—they finally chose a piece they like, but they need to ask the sales person two things—price, and availability. Easy enough, right? Unfortunately, for many flooring companies, this is not a seamless process, even in today’s age. Why is that?

Flooring prices and inventory can and will vary. This is just part of business—any business, really. So what is next for the sales person? Typically, they’ll politely tell the customer to hang tight while they hurry over to the back to look for the price and availability. They’ll either look through a shelf filled with pricebooks or login to their computer and search for a PDF or Excel spreadsheet from a particular supplier. Meanwhile, the customer out front is (hopefully) patiently waiting, while wondering what is taking so long.

Don’t make customers wait!

The sales rep takes a moment to make sure he got the right information. FINALLY, he locates the item number and unfortunately, the item has been discontinued. After the 10 minutes elapses, he walks back to the front to deliver the disappointing news.

Why is this process so disjointed and archaic? The flooring industry has not had technology in place that connects a vast network of retailers and vendors allowing them to communicate on-the-fly, sharing real-time flooring pricing and inventory…until now.

VendorPriceBook was developed by someone who felt the pain of not being able to make this system work efficiently. He was tired at how unorganized and slow the process of looking up pricing was, so he decided to change that. VendorPriceBook is a web-based and online app that vendors and retailers in the flooring industry use to connect instantaneously.

Benefits:

• Mobile app—offer pricing right on the showroom floor
• Up-to-date pricing
• Offering Vendors an eco-friendly and practical way to quickly provide up-to-date pricing.
• Maximize productivity
• Retailers can now use this system and avoid the process of searching through hundreds of pages to find prices.
• Strictly confidential

It’s 2021 and it’s time for your business to step in line with technology so you can save time, money and start being efficient. Try out VendorPriceBook for free at vendorpricebook.com