Is it possible that you are forgetting what you did when you first opened the doors of your store?  You kept everything so simple.  It might have been because your checkbook didn’t allow you to buy a nice selection of inventory, run fancy ads, or hire a team of trained sales people.  But didn’t this simplicity start the success of your business?

In this article, I will tell you how to rid your store of complication while focusing on sales.

Before I give you the tools to make this happen, I would like to compare another industry to make the point.

Think of your favorite restaurant.  How large was the menu?  Isn’t it irritating when there are over 100 items on the menu and you don’t know what to order?  What do you do?  You almost always ask the waiter to sort it out, right?  Then you wait for the food and wonder about the integrity of the waiter and if you will like the food.  Or, you try to figure it out yourself and then wonder if you should have just had the burger!

Now, compare this to jewelry sales. By time the salesperson explains too much, the buyer has lost his or her appetite.  Often they just want to hear, “it’s beautiful” or “you deserve it”, or that it makes them look great.  Obviously this is where relationship, trust, and simplicity come into order.

In my 25 years experience in the jewelry business and having trained countless sales people, sometimes the answer lies in how complicated we make things.

As the French author C.W. Ceran wrote, “Genius is the ability to reduce the complicated to the simple.” 

Let’s do just that.

First, take a look at your last ten transactions and try to remember how long it took to make the sale.  Of the ten sales you made, how many of them took less than 15 minutes? What if each of your transactions was less than 15 minutes? Your sales would be phenomenal!

Second, think about the language you used and how you presented the jewelry that caused the sale to happen so quickly. Think of the words you said and how you said them. I never teach “canned scripts” in my seminars, rather I teach how to listen to your clients. Really listen. Most customers tell you all you need to know within the first 2 minutes of the conversation. Are you listening and repeating back to them what they want? Active listening is a sure way to create a faster sale while building trust and credibility.

Once you finish this exercise, you will realize what works best for you and your client.  If they made a decision within 15 minutes, they have more time for the rest of their day, and you have more time to devote to additional sales. And it all occurs when you simplify the menu for your clients!

Ivan Levi is a sales trainer and president of Ivan Alan Solutions™, a Chicago based company that understands the independent jeweler’s subtleties that puts them in a league of their own.  Ivan can be reached at 800-235-1918.