SAF 2014: Build the Perfect Sales Script With Tim Huckabee

His first session, presented on Thursday afternoon was called "Create Bigger, Better Wholesale Sales (and Happier Customers, Too)". Tim has been working directly with floral wholesalers, doing on-site training with them designed to build sales, expand the range of products each shop buys, and strengthen relationships with retailers for some time. This was his first open workshop, geared exclusively toward wholesalers, and covering this material.

The goal was to help wholesalers...

• Encourage their sales teams to promote new products and get customers to give them a try
• Recapture sales from a retailer whose business has been filtering away
• Increase standing orders

The session was well attended and the feedback was very good.

On Friday and Saturday Tim was back to focussing on retail. This is where he got his start and there is nobody better in the industry.

The FloralStrategies approach, first developed during Tim's time at a busy retail slower shop, does increase average order values significantly, but that is just the side effect. The real benefit of his approach is that it is all about understanding the customer and situation before making suggestions. The higher order values come because the customer has been serviced better. This is in stark contrast to sales trainers that push an aggressive and unsustainable approach of trying to simply increase every sale over the one that came before it.

In this new interactive session Tim looked at typical, old-fashioned sales tactics and then created a new, more professional — but conversational — sales script. The result was a natural-sounding script attendees could take home and put to work right away

Materials from Tim's session are available to members on the SAF website. For more information on Tim and his training programs are available on the FloralStrategies website.