Stay in the Loyalty Loop

By James (Jimmy) DeGroot, Jewelry Store Training Institute

Green Bay, WI--What are you spending your non-selling time doing? Are you acting like a salesclerk, waiting for the next customer to show up in front of you?

Or are you acting like a sales professional and fostering relationships and practicing quality outreach with your existing and future customers?

Look at your sales like a water pump like grandma and grandpa used to have on the farm. When you pump it, it must be primed but the water doesn’t come right away. It takes a bit for the water to flow, but when it’s flowing, it’s a beautiful thing! Then, when we stop pumping, the water keeps flowing, but not for long. Soon it fizzles to a trickle. It’s at these times in our stores that we’re all looking around asking, “Where IS everybody? How come business is so slow?”

Well, we stopped pumping the water months ago. Now this analogy of course applies to advertising but even MORE so it applies to your outreach and training efforts. You’re sales professionals, not clerks.

Be a Proactive Professional

Professionals take their careers seriously and are proactive every day, sharpening their craft and reaching out or clienteling. McKinsey and Company writes regularly on new trends in marketing and sales and recently published an article titled “The Consumer Decision Journey.” In this article they discuss how the NEW journey doesn’t end at the sale. It continues, if the customer had a great experience, round and round and round starting with the moment of purchase, to the post purchase experience and ongoing exposure. OUTREACH, then on to the next buying trigger, and then back to the purchase, like a flywheel.

They call it the Loyalty Loop and the key to the loyalty loop is ongoing outreach where the customer no longer considers other brands, because You’ve built the relationship with them.

Stay in that loyalty loop. You can’t stay there by being clerks. Clerks are for grocery stores. You’re a sales professional developing a lifelong pipeline of customers through daily outreach. You’re likely already experiencing a slowdown in business, but you can ensure that a slowdown never happens at your store.

Just keep pumping the pump and stay in the loyalty loop!