Drawing Them In Exterior Innovations in Savannah, Ga., gets about 7% of its revenue — which in 2004 hit $6 million — from customers who visit its 2,000-square-foot showroom, a converted house that has been open since January in an area of town rezoned as commercial. Clark Brockman, Exterior’s owner, predicts that as customers become more aware of its existence, his showroom eventually will account for 15% of sales and, within a decade, will produce $2 million in business.
Although Exterior does no showroom-specific advertising, Brockman spends $50,000 to $60,000 per month on marketing. In May, he launched a three-month, $75,000 campaign to promote his company (including his showroom) on TV and through billboards. Other contractors assert that aggressive advertising is imperative for attracting customers to their showrooms. “We continually run ads to create leads, and the majority of our walk-ins are driven to our showroom by hard marketing,” says Joe Ronzino, general manager of Four Seasons Sunrooms, which has a 3,300-square-foot showroom at its headquarters in Holbrook, N.Y. In May, Four Seasons began running a promotion called “The Great Summer Cookout,” which offered homeowners a free Weber grill with the purchase of a sunroom.
Contractors draw prospects to the showroom with attractions ranging from the gimmicky to the sublime. Champion Window & Siding in the Chicago area offers window purchasers a five-year supply of glass cleaner that they can pick up at the showroom as they run out. Jack’s Wholesale Window, with three showrooms in Michigan and Indiana, conducts “warehouse sales” during which it sells at-cost windows that had either been wrongly measured or were never picked up. For several years, Alure Home Improvements has drawn customers to its 7,500-square-foot, three-floor showroom in East Meadow, N.Y., with a service it calls “Digital Imaging.” Alure takes digital photos of a customer’s home and brings that customer into the showroom where those images are projected onto a 42-inch plasma screen. The images are then enhanced to show how different products would look once installed. “This is a tremendous selling tool,” says Alure marketing director Seth Selesnow.
Recently, Four Seasons’ Holbrook location joined forces with a local winery, Wolffer Estate Vineyards, to conduct a wine tasting at its showroom. Ronzino did a 6,000-piece mailing to promote the event, and the tasting drew about 65 people. “We had demonstrators there, but there was no hard sell. Sometimes the showroom is simply good for exposure.” Chicago-based Siding-1/Windows-1, which gets 5% of its leads from its two showrooms, recently initiated a program, borrowed from Alure, that rewards customers points toward a trip to the Caribbean for purchases and referrals. Siding-1/Windows-1’s salespeople can offer homeowners extra points just for visiting its showrooms and double points if they sign a contract on the spot.
No promotion, though, can compensate for a poorly located venue. Siding-1/Windows-1, whose 20,000-square-foot headquarters includes two showroom areas, has been looking to relocate its smaller second showroom, which is located inside a strip mall in Lombard, Ill. “We had a woman come into that showroom who said she’d been shopping in that mall for eight years and didn’t know we were there,” says Doug Hodges, Siding-1/Windows-1’s general manager.
The Show Room Conundrum Brockman sees two types of customers coming into his showroom, that displays seamless siding, windows, gutters, sunrooms, and conservatories: the curious, who mainly turn out to be tire kickers; and “people who have been thinking about [a remodeling project] and know what they want.” The latter, he says, are “very easy to sell if you can get the price right.”
Contractors concur that a showroom customer is usually a better lead. Four Seasons Sunrooms, with more than 300 locations in North America, has found that customers are 60% more likely to purchase a sunroom after visiting one of its showrooms, says communications director Jim Ruppel. Homeowners who visited Bee Window and Renewal by Andersen’s showrooms, in Indianapolis and West Lafayette, Ind., and then made a purchase last year, on average spent $1,500 more on windows than buyers who hadn’t visited the showrooms, owner George Faerber says.
Yorktown, Va.-based Melani Bros. has found that its closing rate with visitors to its 900-square-foot display area for windows, siding, and sunrooms is five percentage points higher than with other customers, says vice president of sales and marketing Rick Menendez. About 9% of Melani’s leads come from its showroom, and $1 million of the $16 million in revenue this contractor generated in 2004 derived from customers who scheduled an appointment at its showroom.
Who Will Staff It? Contractors staff their showrooms with employees whose primary job is to schedule appointments, not sell. So, is a salesperson’s time best spent manning a showroom? Yoho recommends that a salesperson should “always” be available during working hours, whereas Four Seasons advises against using salespeople in that capacity because, as Ruppel explains, “they tend to pre-qualify customers.” Most contractors seem to be splitting the difference: Jack’s, for example, assigns its 50 salespeople to showroom duty for one half or one full day per week, says Tom Halm, regional sales and marketing manager. Piwowar says that all of his employees are “cross trained” to sell in the field or inside the showroom, though they rarely do both.
Regardless of who they assign to greet customers, contractors say their objective is to get customers to commit to an appointment to meet with a salesperson in their homes. The trick, they say, is to make the “guest” feel comfortable as quickly as possible without delving too deeply into the project itself. Yoho calls this “the showroom conundrum, where you create an inviting environment, and then want them out of there in 15 minutes.”
There are practical reasons for this tactic. Menendez of Melani Bros. points out that customers might get scared off if they were given a price at the showroom without a salesperson being able to explain at their homes why windows or sunrooms cost what they do. “If we answered every question, we’d never be able to get [customers] emotionally involved about adding a window or putting in a sunroom.”
Dziedzic thinks contractors make a big mistake when they talk to showroom visitors about products too soon. “If you take them over to the window right away, you’re dead, because people can buy windows anywhere. We first need to show them what makes Muhler different. If they don’t like you, they aren’t going to buy from you, no matter how good your product is. If they like you, you’re in.” — John Caulfield is a freelance writer and editor in New Jersey. He has been reporting on the home improvement field for more than two decades.