KITCHEN/BATH CABINETS BUSINESS

kitchen/bath cabinets

Cabinets can be a very interesting part of your work in a Home Improvement store. A successful sale and installation is a major event in your customer’s life. It’s a change they probably have been dreaming about for years and one they will enjoy for many more years.
It’s also a large sale for you and your store and one with good profit potential. If you do a good job with cabinets there will be winners all around including you, your store and your customer!
Doing a good job with cabinets means extended knowledge in a number of areas: kitchen layout and design, cabinet manufacture, quality choices, measuring, countertops, installation and more.
Many times a chapter of instruction is written to take you from the small points and build to the overall picture. This chapter will be the opposite.
We first want you to see kitchen design and layout principles, then take a look at the sizes and styles manufactured so the kitchens can be laid out, sold and ordered by you, to fit into the floor plan layouts wanted by your customers.

SELLING KITCHENS

This chapter will be quite technical with information on sizes, construction, etc., but right up front, we want to remind you that when selling “cabinets” only 10% or so of the information you give the customer should be technical. And you don’t want to spend any more time than that selling “cabinets”.

Ninety percent of your time should be spent selling benefits. Benefits such as convenience, beauty, pride, value and more. Whatever the customer really wants from his or her purchase. One of Paul Cabinet Sourcing's commitment is to help you increase the benefits you can sell to your customers.

Not too many people just want to buy cabinets. They may want to make their kitchens (and whole house) look good for an upcoming graduation, or anniversary, or some other occasion, but they don’t want to buy cabinets (after all they cost money). The only way to achieve the fresh new look they want, however, is to replace those old unappealing cabinets now in their kitchens. So even if they don’t want to buy cabinets, in order to achieve the goal they want, that’s just exactly what they’ll have to do.  

PRODUCT KNOWLEDGE

In order to give you a good foundation with which to sell benefits, we’ll spend a lot of time on product knowledge. This will help you tailor your cabinets to the customer’s needs and desires.

You’ll have to pick the 2 or 3 bits of product knowledge the customer is interested in, from the 200 or more you have available in your mind. Only display as much product knowledge as is appropriate for the specific customer. The objective during the sale is to help the customer buy, not to “show-off” your product knowledge.

Cabinets can be used in all rooms of a house and often are. Kitchens are the most common, followed by bathrooms. But cabinets are also common for storage in dining rooms, dens, family rooms, home offices, laundry rooms, etc.

This chapter is mostly about kitchen cabinets and kitchen design, since these are the most complicated cases you will probably have. But remember to direct your cabinet selling efforts to all parts of the house when appropriate.


To be continued. Next episode is "kitchen layout and design"

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