Spa Sales Success TEST

Copyright Pete Scott ltd 2014 www.masterofminset.com

Spa Sales Success

‘Creating business athletes in the spa and

wellness industry.’

By Pete Scott


Introduction When considering the approach on how to write this e-‐book, I couldn’t help feeling like I needed to tone down the style. A few close friends had read it through and stated it may just piss off the entire spa industry and instead of getting somewhere, I would be banned for life from the one place where I know I could do good. Yet, after taking a long walk through one of London’s parks I realised I needed to stay true to my cause and one of the main reasons why change hasn’t yet happened in the spa industry is because we don’t hurt enough yet, we are just dare I say ‘getting by.’ The only problem is that getting by doesn’t help us to be the best possible person that we can be, getting by actually holds us back and means we end up repeating the same things over and over again and expecting a different result, as Einstein said, this is insanity. For things to change we do have to change certain habits, behaviours and strategies, only then can we expect the results to also change. I would imagine you are one of 3 types of people and whichever one you are, I still would like to welcome you here and say thank you for taking the time to click through and download this material. If you are the first type of person then you are a go getter, you will already be getting great results in your career or business and you will be resonating with what has already been said, you will even perhaps read this e-‐book a few times taking great notes throughout. You will use this material as a resource to take your great results to an even superior level. If you are the second type of person then you are highly motivated, but you are not yet breaking through in your business or career results. It’s almost as if your level of results doesn’t come close to your level of motivation? If you fall into either of these categories of people, wonderful, you are in the right place and once again I welcome you here.


Finally, the third type of person probably wouldn’t have even clicked through to get to this e-‐book and more than likely wouldn’t have read to this paragraph. They are the sheep of this world following all of the other sheep around and every time a new opportunity comes along, they simply ‘baa,’ and carry on being a sheep.

You have met many sheep in your life; they are the people who completely resist change. They may even ‘baa’ at the same pub they have ‘baa’d’ at for the last 20 years. They try and up sell to their clients in a way that only works 1 out of every 10 times but they continue to do this client after client, week after week and year after year. Seriously…. If you’re only able to up sell 1 out of 10 times to your client, your

current strategy just doesn’t work. FACT: It’s time to try something different.

Unless you are sheep that is, carry on but don’t expect anything to change.

In order to be great, you must be a lion, a tiger or an eagle. None of these species concern their mind with the opinions of sheep. One person told me recently they would prefer to be a dolphin. I believe this ok too. Dolphins are smart, caring, they work well as a team, they live life to the fullest and they are free out in the open water!


It has to fit your own personal WORLD Something very important to remember is that we are always doing our best to fit the external world with what makes sense in our internal world. In NLP (Neurology Linguistic Programming) we call this our MAP. If you are a lion (or dolphin) and you are out there giving life your absolute best, do you think this will fit the inner world (map,) of someone who is a sheep? Chances are you will completely freak them out and all they can do is ‘baa’ because the way you are living your life, your opinions and your character is so much more than a sheep could ever be. But here is the thing; a sheep will only want you to also be a sheep. He or she will try and tell you a hundred different reasons of why you shouldn’t be the tiger, the eagle, the lion or the dolphin. They will say you should just calm down and live life in a safe way, or that baa baa baa baa baa baa baa. Don’t ever succumb to the easy life of a sheep, not if you want your spa career and business to be great! You must be far more, you are powerful beyond measure! When delivering training as I very regularly do with spa students, professionals and managers, I always remind them that we are a reflection of who we surround ourselves with. Surround yourself with sheep, you will eventually become a sheep, surround yourself with dolphins, then great, you will find the inspiration to enjoy the open water just as dolphins do! Why be restricted to a field eating grass all day and told what to do by a dog? We are in the eye of the storm

For anyone who has been in the eye of a tropical storm and survived to tell the story, they will say that the eye is actually a very calm


place. It’s almost as if the storm has passed you by but inevitably the while the tropical winds will return and do devastating damage. I believe we are in the eye of the storm within the spa and beauty industry. A few years ago the recession hit us, then mass discount marketing such as Groupon and KGB deals changed the perception of the consumer to only value spa treatments at £10 per hour, one deal I came across was £7 for a 90 minute treatment! But now, things have settled a little, a lot of spas have backed away from discount marketing and have seen their businesses steadily recover. However, here is the thing, this calm that ‘some of us’ feel now is not going to last, the storm didn’t ever leave, much more is still to come and many are not even close to ready for it. A hint of things to come is that the consumer is now becoming more educated than ever before on how to look after their skin and wellness but the question is ‘where are they getting that education from?’ and ‘is it accurate education?’ A blog or Cosmopolitan online might not be the best educator. Truth remains, if you are passionate about skincare or wellbeing as a spa professional, there will never be a better place for people to learn about their skin or wellness other than from you. You should be your client’s personal expert and that is the real value of what you or your business offers. I discuss this in much greater detail when working with spas directly. The second wave of the storm actually comes from the thousands of options now available to our customers. You only need to walk down any high street in the UK and you will come across at least 5 to 10 spas or beauty salons. What makes you different to any other? If it’s that you are cheaper is that a good thing? If you say you are more passionate, will that be enough to convince the customer when next door they can get the same treatment for literally half the price you can afford to offer it for? I am going to be completely honest here ‘your customers do not care about how passionate you are or how much you LOVE what you do. They care about getting the right service or product and now that we


are in the information era they are literally STARVING for information. Are you are leader in sharing information for your clients?’ Please note: I am not stating we shouldn’t be passionate or inspired about what we do. In fact, I recommend it at the highest level! What I am saying though is that your passion against the salon down the road is not a fair fight; you must find your uniqueness that you can offer to your client base. If change is required, why hasn’t it already happened? The short answer – there are too many sheep in this industry. The second short answer – too many dinosaurs are running the industry. We will get to this later on. You probably know already that change is a really difficult thing to do. We much prefer (as a species) to do what we are familiar with as opposed to constantly adapting our approach to keep up with an ever-‐changing external world. Yet, by not changing what is the ultimate result? Well, let me ask you what it means to you. ‘If you take the knowledge that you have now and you do little more to improve that knowledge and you run your business or column in a similar way not really adapting to change that is needed, where do you feel you will be in 12 months from now? 2 years? 5 years from now?’ ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ ‘The one constant is change.’ -‐ Buddha. Bear this in mind, there are always 2 worlds, there is the external world and then there is the internal world, which is the world personal to you. Even reading this right now you are making it fit into your own opinions, values, thoughts, beliefs, experiencing and conditioning!


Quick advice for now is don’t get too wrapped up in the external world fitting to your internal world, a lot of people try and live this way their whole life and in the long run it can be extremely damaging. Instead, ask how you can adapt your inner world to make the most of the outer world we have all been given! The outer world is a gift but we need to keep in mind it is always changing, we must be adaptable to change in order to survive and especially to thrive. The sheep of our industry are incapable and unwilling to adapt. The whole industry can change right in front of them and they will change nothing about themselves. Be warned, avoid investing your time with too many sheep, you must find the people, the coaches, the mentors who will inspire you, challenge you and keep pushing you to get the absolute best out of your career and business! 5 reasons why we are struggling in the spa industry Let’s get down to some of the real root issues that have been within our industry for far too long. I will be honest, I am tired of them and they need to change. Not only this, I am willing to work relentlessly through my own business Pete Scott ltd to ensure this change happens. 1) Client buying habits are very different in 2014 compared to 2004, especially 1994!

One of the worst things we can do is teach sales techniques to spa therapists and especially spa or beauty students! More so than this, the majority of sales techniques still taught within the spa industry today are 10 to even 20 years old! To say that sales techniques which worked 20 years ago still work on today’s client base is an insult to the consumer. It’s saying that people still make decisions in the same way now as they did back then. We both know this isn’t true.


For the first time in our history we have access to an infinite level of information on a touchscreen device that fits in our pocket and more so than this we can access this information within 2 to 4 seconds. Do you honestly believe that ‘product presentations’ still work? When you present a product at the end of a treatment you are immediately presenting a list of objections in your clients mind. They are thinking: ‘Can I get this cheaper online?’ ‘Does it really do all the things this therapist is telling me it does? Hmm, I should look it up.’ ‘I can get this on E-‐bay.’ The reason why product presentation training is still taught is purely because as an industry we haven’t adapted, we haven’t changed. Sales training needs to focus on the way people make buying decisions in 2014 and why this is so different to a decade ago. At Pete Scott ltd we only train therapists and other wellness professionals in a way that fits the current consumer, not the 1993 Sleepless in Seattle way. 2) Consultants and dinosaurs, many are the same thing

I am not sure I am going to win any friends with what I am about to share but I also feel that by holding back and not saying it would be more damaging in the long run. The spa and wellness industry is a traditional one. It has some great values and I love every single day being a part of it. The challenge with being so traditional though means that things could be better in a number of areas.


We can start by looking at the hierarchy of the industry. If you study cutting edge companies in any industry an extremely high percentage, if not all, have a more even hierarchal system where every staff member is empowered, can voice an opinion and be creative, thus feeling like they are contributing to the overall success of the business. This is one of the reasons for the great success of Facebook in just a few years; everybody got to create their own personal webpage! This is something that hasn’t really happened within the spa industry as a whole. From my limited experience directly over the last 5 years or so, I have seen just a few people within the industry who control the masses. We are told how the industry is moving forward as opposed to everybody contributing to the movement, many events are run where although they can be informative, are a one way transfer of information where you attend and a speaker simply tells you what’s hot, what’s not and a lot of what hot is the same things they were saying were hot 3 years before! It doesn’t always make a lot of sense. Finally, every industry has consultants working within it and none seem more commonplace than that of the spa industry. The only concern is that many of these consultants are spa owners and managers from a number of years ago and guess what? Yes, you got it, they are recommending today’s spa owners run their businesses in the same way they did back in the 1990s or even 1980s! Dinosaurs back in their day were incredible, some were amazingly strong, others were faster than any species alive today and they fitted their environment perfectly for that time. But, there is only one problem; dinosaurs have been extinct for over 60 million years. Now, we have the human species inhabiting the Earth. In other words, things change. I have no problem at all with consultants as a whole, I think it’s great to seek out solid advice from someone who has a positive track record and can prove their results within your business too.


I would just like to state with a word of caution that if a consultant is offering you everything from operations, sales, financial to management training then the chances are you have found a generalist not a specialist. Find a plumber for your plumbing and an electrician for your electric. Secondly, a manifested dinosaur is a consultant who as already mentioned is still trying to share ideas that worked maybe 10 or 20 years ago but are not necessarily the right fit for today. Be current, focus on what the marketplace wants and needs now. One of the reasons why we launched Spa Business Bootcamp is because it’s an event where the audience are FULLY involved in the day, they contribute to the learning process, they interact and they share best practice. Spa Business Bootcamp 2015 plans to sell out with 500 spa professionals in attendance, I hope you will be one of them? Early bird tickets go on sale soon at www.spabusinessbootcamp.com 3) Looking in the wrong places

Have you ever been at home frantically looking for something and then your husband or wife walks in and in 2 seconds they find the item you have been searching for, for over 30 minutes? Your partner then says ‘you just were looking in the wrong place.’ If you cannot relate to above point then I would say you are not a human being, I think it’s something all of us have been through once or twice in our life or this week ☺. In our everyday life it’s fine to look in the wrong place from time to time, this is a part of life. Yet, when it comes to a particular challenge across an entire industry it’s probably a really good idea to before you start searching, ask where the best place is to actually look?


I have no doubt that the desire and want to improve retail performance, re-‐bookings and overall revenue results has been a real emotion of the industry and the business owners, managers and spa professionals within it but even with all the desire in the world, there comes a time when every search if you keep coming up empty you just call things off and go back to what you are comfortable with. As we discussed earlier in this e-‐book, sales technique training is not the best way to move forward when it comes to improving your sales results. Let me repeat this because it’s that important ‘sales technique training is not the best way to move forward when it comes to improving your sales results.’ For years and years we have invested into training within beauty colleges that talks about getting your client to say ‘yes’ 3 times or what to say to overcome objections but I can guarantee you now putting this type of training at the forefront of the industry will only continue to get therapists to feel less and less confident about actually selling as a part of their job. Think about this logically for a moment, if you are a spa therapist (perhaps you are,) would you prefer to have 10 different sales techniques you need to think about all of the time when selling but you don’t really enjoy selling? Or, would you prefer to not worry so much about sales techniques at all but you simply LOVE to help your clients as much as you possibly can to have better skin and wellness? The answer in short is an obvious one, actually making this happen requires an approach to sales training where the word ‘sales’ doesn’t even really need to be used. One of my top reasons for forming Pete Scott ltd was to ensure that we are teaching the skills that actually help a therapist or wellness professional feel great about the sales process, instead of dreading it. Also, getting them to see things from a completely different angle, as we all know when we change the way we look at things, the things we look at also change. How have we managed to formulate a cutting edge industry sales training solution? We did this through asking the right questions to


find out where the root of the problem is first, we found out where to look and what we found is what you are reading now. 4) Change is the hardest thing to do

Speaking of change, how easy it is to change something you have done perhaps day in and day out for the last 10 years? Or more so than this, if you are a spa manager and if you don’t mind me saying so, you have been in the industry for upwards of 20 years, how difficult is it to change the way you train your team in this particular area of retail and revenue success? The answer, it’s exceptionally difficult and the reason for this is because every time we have a new experience in life we lay down a new neural pathway in our mind for that experience. This is extremely exciting when we are growing up and the first 8 years of our life especially we are constantly laying down these neural pathways but then, as we become adults guess what happens? It actually becomes a lot easier to just run the same neural pathways over and over again and this is why over 50% of our day is ran completely on autopilot. If this happens to us as individuals then what do you think happens across an entire industry? The implications are huge! The final stage of this is that you will then get MANY people, or sheep actually PROTECTING this old way of thinking and these old neural pathways. Some will protect it till the bitter end. Be warned of the power of the sheep mindset. How do we overcome this? Well, make sure you are constantly learning and growing, keep pushing forward despite all the sheep out there tempting you to stay put. Feel free to ‘like’ my Facebook page where I post daily tips on how we can keep evolving in the spa and wellness industry. https://www.facebook.com/petescottmindset


5) Planting in the sand

Over 20,000 students are qualifying every year in the UK alone and who knows what that number grows to worldwide. The truth is that the future of our industry does not lie in the dinosaurs but actually in the seeds or in other words, the students. One thing I want to make clear is that I am not a generalist, I do not claim to know the beauty industry inside out, what I do know though is human potential, what creates successful revenue results and an inspired workforce, this is also the speciality of Pete Scott ltd. When it comes to how we train students in being ‘industry ready’ we are far from where we need to be at this stage. If you are a manager you can confirm this for yourself by simply answering the following questions: ‘Are newly qualified therapists that you have employed able to hit the ground running with retail performance?’ ‘Are they able to naturally up sell to courses and retain their clients?’ ‘Do they come across confident to a certain degree in how to carry themselves when working within your business with customers, telephone calls and other team members?’ I am relatively certain you would of answered ‘no’ to most if not all of these questions. At Pete Scott ltd, we are fully committed to working with the education of these emotional intelligence, mindset and selling skills at the college level. If you are a college tutor or you work within a beauty college, then do get in touch directly with me, I would be happy to discuss how this training could be installed into your


college programme and what steps we would need to take. Contact me at [email protected] So then, what do we do next? There are many things that we need to do in order to move forward with sales results in the spa industry and helping our clientele to our ultimate potential. However, it starts with a change in attitude towards how we sell in the first place within this industry. By focusing too heavily on relaxation we actually miss out most of the opportunity to really help our clients improve their skin and wellbeing. Over the years I personally developed a system called the ‘selling health system’ that first of all is a constantly growing system to keep up with the world but secondly is a system that gets to the root of why people need to relax in the first place. When this system is used properly revenue performance can go up by 300%! One therapist I worked with actually increased her overall performance by over 1000%. If it was possible for her then it is possible for you and your spa team. A change in thinking but more important, a change in emotion I have stated many times throughout this e-‐book that a change in thinking is key but funnily enough, I would put a change in emotion first. What do I mean by this? Having a high emotional intelligence can set you and your spa career/business on a rocket ship of success! I believe almost everybody knows what needs to be done on an academic level but very few have the EQ (emotional intelligence,) to truly take action and follow through with their goals. Selling isn’t easy, you need to be sharp, you need to be motivated and you definitely need to be inspired! People buy when they are inspired to buy and in order for them to become inspired they need to be around an inspirational person! ‘Knowing isn’t enough, we must do.’ – Bruce Lee.


A lot of spa managers have said to me these skills cannot be taught. I would strongly disagree; I would simply say that in the past we didn’t have the knowledge of how to teach them, now we do, and with that ability we must take responsibility and share these skills with every professional in the industry whether a student or veteran. Committing to look after clients long term Overall, everything that has been discussed within this material is to help you help the end user on a greater scale. By helping enough people to get what they want, you will receive what you want and in abundance. I truly hope you see this as the beginning of your learning in this type of area not the end of it. EQ, creating what we call at Pete Scott ltd a Jedi mindset is not something to be here today and gone tomorrow, it’s like a change in lifestyle for our body but for our mind and our business or career! In order to get the body you deserve, you have to keep working at it, and the same is true here. If you are wondering what steps to do next then we have a range of options for you. Join over 1000 spa professionals on our Facebook page. Business tips, discussions and motivational advice is posted there daily: https://www.facebook.com/petescottmindset Make sure you get early bird tickets for Spa Business Bootcamp 2015 in London! This event will attract up to 500 motivated spa professionals, managers and business owners. See you there too! www.spabusinessbootcamp.com No win no fee in house training. Are you are a spa manager or business owner? If so, you can book for Pete to directly deliver training at your business! Not only this, you only are charged for this training when the results start happening. Find out more at ……. Wishing you nothing less than the best success!


Pete S

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Spa Sales Success TEST