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How to Leverage Technology to Scale your Kitchen and Bath Business

“The kitchen and bath industry is ripe for disruption. Technology applied to all aspects of our industry is my number one disrupting trend for 2022 and beyond. Technology will attract talented young people to enter our industry and build their careers, leveraging these powerful tools, which is what our industry needs for long-term growth and sustainability.”

Sarah Reep, CMKBD 

The kitchen and bath industry is behind the eight ball on leveraging technology—look at successful YouTubers, for example.

You may or may not know any top-viewed YouTube channels, but you can quickly find them if you go on the site. Successful YouTube channels have an identifying mark. Each one brands itself in a way that speaks to a specific audience. Their content is fresh and original, well made, and often produced. Users can count on viewing the same high-quality content every time they visit their channel.

Yes, YouTube is a lot different from the kitchen and bath industry, but it is important to take note of the service successful YouTubers give their viewers. Each video they produce features the same themes, graphics, sounds, and production values as the last.

Streamlined service is what drives these top-rated channels into the stratosphere, and now there is a way to streamline your kitchen and bath firm’s sales process and take it into the stratosphere in a matter of weeks!

“The kitchen and bath industry is ripe for disruption”

Making real money in the kitchen and bath industry is found in centralizing the expenses of your business and streamlining it with economies of scale. That’s why satellite locations can earn twice what a flagship store does.

There are two things you can do to earn more revenue:

  1. Have an interactive sales process built around your client needs that your entire staff can master quickly.
  2. Embrace DesignAlign technology. It’s a consultative, project budgeting tool that you can leverage to scale your operations with multiple satellite studios.

Reliance on centralization and replicability

Your prospects want the same excellent, fast service every time they do business with your firm. Getting excellence from your firm means your service is faster and streamlined to deliver the same high-quality service every time—all at lower overhead.

To earn more revenue by getting bigger jobs faster, your clients need to receive superior service regardless of how and where they access your firm or with whom they speak.

It’s all about consistency!

  1. Consumers love consistent processes and delivery. It builds their trust in a company.
  2. You’ll charge up to 40% more – and earn more gross profit with every job.
  3. It’s reasonably easy to do this – guide your team to follow a disciplined sales process.

It’s not like the old days where firms relied on the hotshot sales designers for their revenue. Any of the great hires on your team can successfully use DesignAlign regardless of their experience!

Turn the selling process into a conversation and sell more with every job

Consumers want the inside scoop on products and pricing. If you turn selling from a wall of information into an interactive conversation – where your prospect knows how the pricing goes into a job – they’ll spend more money.

When I was looking to expand my business – Signature Kitchens and Baths – in the 80s, the smart move was to hire the competition’s best salespeople. If you had a bunch of stars working for you, you’d sell more kitchen and bath jobs.

I ended up recruiting people with little or no kitchen and bath sales experience, as I found star salespeople came with baggage from their previous position that could hinder their performance under new leadership. Critics said it wouldn’t work, but after intensive training, these new hires with 3-6 months of sales experience under their belts tied my most experienced sales persons’ 50.5% gross profit margins.

I owed it to training all my designers the same way. When everybody’s working the same process, clients get the same experience every time, no matter with whom they’re working.

Signature already sold great products – we just improved the method of presentation. Speed, consistency, and delivery of high-quality products and services equal great value. Today, it’s well known that consumers are willing to pay more for superior value – as long as there is demonstrable proof.

Our clients were paying up to 70% more to do business with us. Signature’s success was streamlining our company with the Good-Better-Best selling process. That client-loving, transparent sales process was leveraged into three additional, highly profitable Connecticut-based showrooms.

GBB selling is the elephant in the room, but it’s not exclusive to our industry. Good-Better-Best selling has been around for decades. Virtually everyone uses it to deliver excellent service every time, make consumers feel good about buying more, and raise their gross profit margins.

Streamline to higher gross profits

Businesses are replicable – people aren’t. By centralizing your sales process into one model that uses Client Relations Management software (CRM), you’re able to cover your customer’s needs from day one onward.

DesignAlign will empower you to:

  • Increase the value of your flagship showroom.
  • Make scaling your business faster, more lucrative, and more attractive to potential buyers.
  • Start charging up to 40% more per job.
  • Double your revenue as you master the process and the technology.

It’s proven to work like we’re saying it does.

DesignAlign streamlines your firm in two guided ways

DesignAlign has built-in wizards that are very helpful for implementation. The “workflow assistant” guides you where to go and what to do – making the highly intuitive navigation foolproof.

But, for those in a rush, we’ll show you how to maximize its capabilities with a person-guided tutorial. If you select the Team Pro software option, DesignAlign’s Director of Training, Jodi Tramontin, CMKBD, will teach you and your staff how to use this brilliant software in a one-to-two day class. Using the Team Pro option, Jodi will get your team confidently up and running with DesignAlign within a matter of weeks.

Join us at the next roundtable

Roundtables are SEN’s highest-rated event at our semi-annual conferences. Invest in your business by joining us for the next one. You’ll learn the best practices from members who are receiving valuable growth benefits from DesignAlign – and make it a team-wide success for your firm too.

Plus, non-member personnel will be able to sample our most revered benefits and show our membership the value they can add to our group. Contact Catherine for more information and to register.

Ken Peterson, CKD