The Extra Mile - The Follow-up

A merchant who approaches business with the idea of serving the public
well has nothing to fear from the competition.
- James Cash Penney


This will be the last of the Extra Mile series but perhaps the most compelling. "Follow-Up" is perhaps my favorite service topic and probably the easiest to institute.
Once you have bought into pre-service, post-service becomes an automatic. The phone and email skills are the same. The industry wide problem is many facilities do neither. However, if you are reading this and realize that every day is an opportunity to enhance the experience your facility provides, you will find it easy to compete and your customer will tell the story for you.

Near the end of last October, I received a phone call from the General Manager at Martin Honda Dealership in Newark, Delaware which is where I purchased my last car. It is, by the way, a very busy dealership with an incredible service department. Here was the message.

“Mr. Kirchner, this is Ron Applegate from Martin Honda. I’m calling to ask you to do me a favor.”

“Sure Ron, what can I do for you?”

“Please tell your wife that everyone here at Martin wishes her a happy birthday and thanks to both of you for your business. I notice you are on our maintenance schedule and I want to make sure you happy with our service department.”

“Yes, they are great in fact.”

“Thanks again and anytime you need anything or just want to talk about cars call me – my personal number is 555-5555 and I’d love to hear from you. Thanks again.”

I hung up the phone thinking three things:

1. Why would I ever want to buy a car anywhere else?
2. Do the shops I work with make this type of call?
3. I’d better get my wife something for her birthday.

At a golf shop consider the following two scenarios.

1. A club member at an east-coast high-end club has a guest in from Chicago. He buys a Peter Millar shirt in the shop. The assistant at the counter introduces himself as Jeff, thanks him and asks him for a business card. A week later the young man sends our Chicagoan an email.

“We hoped you enjoyed your day with us last week and are happy with the Peter Millar shirt you purchased. If I can ever do anything for you including gift wrap and ship some similar logoed shirts to your friends please let me know. My number here at the shop is 555-5555.
All the best,
Jeff
from high-end club.”

Mr. Chicago immediately forwards the email to the member who invited him to the club with a note praising Jeff, “The golf staff at your club is the best in the country, no question.” He then tells the story every time the subject of service at golf clubs comes up.

2. A customer buys a new driver, a rain jacket, two new shirts and a hat, spends $1000. It is two weeks later and no one has even thought about calling him to see if he’s hitting the ball further. There is no Jeff at this Shop.

The golf industry and your facility in particular should take heed. The successful, as we have been discussing, are those who are trying harder, much like the more I practice the luckier I get.
I don’t know if I have ever heard anyone in any shop make this type of personalized thank you and “anything I can do for you” call or email but it should be standard operating procedure and is almost guaranteed to create business. When the customer with the new driver is called with an inquiry as to his satisfaction and the comment is made to close the call “if there is anything I can ever do for you” the new-driver-guy is already thinking about what that could be.


In summary the Extra Mile entries have stressed wanting to increase sales by providing better service and taking advantage of the intimacy of our repeating customer base.

Some specific actions to take to accomplish this:


- Contact any scheduled group play to offer all available services.

- Prepare for arriving customers by making it Standard Operating Procedure for your staff to familiarize themselves with profiles when they exist.

- Challenge your staff to learn three things that aren’t apparent about every item in your shop.

- Role play approaching customers in the shop.

- Challenge your staff to pick one customer a day who they will totally wow to the point where they have to tell the story.

- Thank the customer before they leave the shop and when possible walk them to the door.

- Challenge each staff member to make three follow-up thank you calls per day.


I am currently writing a monthly article for PGAMagazine.com called The Upscale Golf Shop. The opportunity to work as part of the PGA Magazine team and to provide editorial that hopefully will inspire ideas that will help with the management of your facility’s retail is for me an honor that I will value and undertake with all the knowledge and experience that I can bring to the table.

Buy to a Strategy

The Merchandise Buy Plan Guide explains the homework and process involved in determining the proper levels and turns of inventory, categories and vendors. It is written generically enough to apply to any pro shop or retail situation. It does not discuss the need to be strategic with the choice of product and vendor as this is obviously different per shop.

The blueprint for your shop’s buy for the coming season may be the most important you have ever made as two things are true.

1. The experts aren’t expecting the current financial crunch to potentially start to heal itself until mid year 2010 at best.
2. Retail has changed dramatically over the past year and while it will recover with the economy the consumer’s enhanced quest for value will be long-lasting.

Retailers who aren’t aggressively going after the business are perceived as not interested enough to be competitive and are not being taken seriously.

I have had this conversation about consumer expectations with many of the major golf-vendor captains and the underlying suggestion is that pro shops need to be diligently ready to take markdowns that will turn inventory as that is the state of the industry. This is true to some extent but to my way of thinking should never be the overriding marketing principle especially since none of the captains mentioned above explained where the lost margin was going to come from. Said another way, old merchandise obviously needs to be reduced and removed but the buy plan should be built around a schedule designed to inspire the consumer not with markdowns but with promotions that are fun, easy to sign and talk up and where the lost margin is minimal and part of the plan. When you limit the vision in your grand design to the sale rack you teach your customer to wait until the merchandise is old before buying. This is not stratagem but defeatist merchandising that creates a downward spiral that is tough to reverse.

The schedule of promotions should be manicured to your customer climate and particular shop layout. Some of the important considerations are:

· What product will be inspirational?
· What vendors will work best with us?
· What category needs help?
· What will look best front & center and be the most customer friendly?

After these concerns are well thought through, the schedule could look something like the following which you will note never mentions percentages off and could become an occurrence that regular customers look forward to:

March, April – Buy a shirt and receive a free hat or perhaps a sleeve of balls

May, June – Buy two shirts and pick out a free pair of shorts

July, August – Any $100 purchase and pick a shirt off the sale rack for free

Sept, October – Any purchase of outerwear and take a pair of winter glove

November, December – Any $100 purchase receives free gift wrapping and a $20 gift certificate for that “other gift”.

Let’s look a little deeper at this schedule.

March, April - Caps can generally be bought for $5-$6 - less than 10% of an $80 shirt. Off-shore deals on caps require larger minimums but a lot of the initial commitment will go away as the result of a successful promotion. There is certainly never any lack of golf balls on special. Shirt vendors may take interest in your effort and help with marked-downs or early in-season off price. Perhaps you introduce Private Label shirts from Pima-Direct where the extra margin needed is built in to the suggested retail price.

May, June – Memorial Day, Father’s Day, etc. – shorts to golf-in season.
Many companies come to mind here, but Greg Norman, for example, has a program that reduces certain in-line shirts by 30% and allows you to buy $24 shorts for $17. Losing $8.50 per 30% off shirts by giving away a pair of these shorts yields 43% margin and is perfect for that center table and inspiring even to the consumer who typically buys his shorts at outlets. Nothing motivates like free. The important thing is that the price of the new spring shirt has not been compromised. The sale rack is in the back room only to be brought out strategically and the consumer is confronted with a proposal that is intriguing at worst.

July, August – Any residual shirts from the spring buy become the sale rack. New shirts for summer renewal should always be bought off-price anyway. Proper vendor relationships help this effort dramatically and will be the subject of a separate entry.

September, October - Think about giving winter gloves as a tournament favor and keeping the balance of that buy as a shop promotion while receiving a tournament discount.

November, December – Holiday business is a great time of year to be creative but many pro shops don’t want to buy special goods this time of year as much as they want to reduce existing inventory. There is no better way to do this than to use gift certificates to your advantage.

Your promotional strategy after thoughtful consideration of your particular shop may be quite different from that described above but the thought process will be the same. This type of promotional schedule combined with a merchandise buy plan based on sound retail principles of space and turn should be adhered to and become the focus of the shop. Participating vendors need to assist with discounts, point-of-sale material and education of your staff to maximize their ability to discuss the promoted products and advance promotions in general.

The next blog entry will discuss the past year in review but probably the most glaring aspect of this season's business was that shops that promoted maintained their volume and in some cases were able to wow their customer. The shops that didn’t have the vision to be aggressive with the times went backwards and those using markdowns as their only form of vigorous marketing lost considerable margin that will now be hard to recover.