When it comes to ensuring the success of your salon business, on-going education is an essential, never-ending investment in both your business and your team’s success. A stylist’s job role is ultimately to grow and build a client base. In order to do this easily and comfortably, upskilling is the key, as every team member must be a financial asset to the salon.
The benefits of providing on-going training are monumental. Stylists are highly creative people who love taking care of your clients to the very best of their ability. As the salon owner or manager, by offering regular technical training, you help to keep your business abreast with industry trends and up to date with the latest fashions, while maintaining passion and enthusiasm amongst your highly inspired team.
We are very lucky that we are all very digitally connected, so it is helpful to encourage your team members to research and source digital education opportunities, to enhance their skills and knowledge from the comfort of your staff room or their own homes. This combined with brand training, weekly in-house training and attending academy upskilling sessions will result in improved productivity, high team morale and increased job satisfaction.
Standing out from the crowd is important because the customer experience is a very competitive battleground and your clients have a lot of choice. To maintain your salon’s reputation, it is necessary to send out a very clear message that your salon is here and you are great at what you do. Providing outstanding customer service is the key to positively differentiate your business from your competitors.
On that basis, if you want to retain your precious clients and increase your ‘word of mouth’ opportunities to generate new business, regular customer service training is a must for your team, to ensure every client is happy leaving, looking forward to returning and is delighted to recommend your salon to friends and family.
Your clients love to buy homecare products, gifts and vouchers at your salon. Having products to retail helps to build excellent client relationships. It provides another revenue stream for your business and your staff can avail of your commission structure if they get on board. Product knowledge and retail sales training helps to teach your team how to get so close to your clients that they tell them what they need well before they realise it themselves. Retail training will equip your team with the confidence to upsell products.
The hard facts of salon business life are that sales affect every waking moment of your day: high sales equals salon success, low sales equal salon failure. The definition of selling is “the exchange of services and products for money”. There is no necessity to ever sell your clients a service or product they don’t need or want – you just need your team to make recommendations, encouraging them to purchase from you and not your competition. When it comes to salon sales, everybody makes mistakes. So, it is up to you to run in-house training sessions to make sure your clients are buying what you are selling.
The most successful salons have the best trained happy teams, because happy staff results in happy, returning, high-spending teams!
