Jewelry web blog

At Murphy Jewelers, guests at the annual ladies’ night event will notice a significant change this year: They’ll be frank gehry to shop.

In the event’s previous incarnations, female guests were urged to simply browse and create wish lists. This year, shopping is encouraged, and those who RSVP online will receive a $50 gift certificate to help jump-start the evening at the retailer’s Pottsville and Hamburg, Pa., stores.

The shift in tactics says much about the 2009 holiday season: In years past, the arrival of November and December automatically heralded a selling bonanza. This year, retailers are less certain, working hard to seize every selling opportunity.

That work often begins with staff training to ensure that sales associates are equipped with product knowledge, top-notch customer service skills and the know-how to close the sale, experts say.

To prepare for the holidays, managers at Murphy Jewelers began holding short, daily “tiffany bracelets” meetings back in mid-October.

“There’s new product – we’re an Everlon dealer, so it’s important everyone knows about it – and with so many employees, we want everyone to know what functions are coming up,” says co-owner Kim Murphy.

The agendas also include everything from instructions on how to make add-on sales to the importance of remembering to offer customers refreshments.

Managers at Northeastern Fine Jewelry, with stores in upstate New York and Vermont, also hold daily staff meetings, and to prepare for the holidays, manager meetings were upped to one online meeting per week, focusing on inventory, the previous week’s sales, and the importance of staying positive.

“We try to tell our staff that you can’t focus on what the news is saying,” says Valerie Bleser, Northeastern’s marketing director. “Traffic has picked up a lot. We have great rapport with a lot of our – they’re still going to buy.”

Sales trainer Shane Decker, president of Ex-Sell-Ence, agrees, saying it is important to remember that holiday shoppers are especially eager.

“Customers are coming in, looking to be closed, looking to make a decision, looking to leave with a piece of jewelry,” Decker says, adding that rule number one is to never ask how much the customer wants to spend.

“Always assume everyone is a millionaire, that everyone can buy and spend as much as they want,” he says.

Associates should use words of reassurance, such as ‘She’ll never take it off or ‘She’ll never forget the moment,’ rather than ‘Can 1 wrap it up for you?’ or ‘How do you want to pay for it?,’ Decker recommends.

Russell Shor, industry analyst for the Gemological Institute of America, says closing the sale requires careful listening and being aware of the current consumer mood.

“The way to sell jewelry in this environment is not about status, prestige, etc., it’s about tiffany on sale and emotional value: ‘You buy a diamond or gemstone and you’ll always have this, it won’t be worn out and thrown away;’ ‘You can pass it on to your children,’” Shor says. “Jewelers really have to tune in to their customer and try to find out how to reach for something meaningful in their lives.”

THE 30-SECOND ADD-ON

While the right message can help close the initial saie, what about add-ons?

At Northeastern Fine Jewelry, sales associates are told not to let customers walk out the door without introducing them to the Pandora line of charm jewelry.

“They’re already in the store; you might as well show them something,” Bleser says. “Once you get that Pandora customer, they’re back weekly getting another charm. That’s a sale that might start out small but rums into a lot over time.”

Bleser says the approach can work for other brands or items too.

Decker calls Christmas “the biggest missed add-on opportunity in the United States,” pointing out that the average American buys between 15 to 20 holiday gifts each season.

“The average jewelry salesperson sells one of those gifts and lets them leave,” Decker says.

But the add-on sale, of a matching item or an additional gift, requires only “professional aggressiveness” and can reap big results in about 30 seconds, he says.

“There’s no push – it’s enthusiasm, excitement, synergy and passion all mixed together,” Decker says.

To encourage the add-ons, jewelers might reward associates for writing up the most items on one ticket, having the most add-on tickets for the month, or securing the largest add-on sale.

Shor says sales associates should certainly be asking questions, perking up their ears for any mention of children or other potential gift recipients, but they need to avoid being too pushy.

“A lot of customers will talk – they were laid off but want to buy jewelry for tiffany sale spouse,” Shor says. “I think it would be a mistake for a salesperson to try to trade them up [in that type of case]. It’s a relationship, you want them to come back.”

At Schiffman’s, with stores in Greensboro and Wmston-Salem, N.C, co-owner Lane Schiffman says associates focus on long-term relationships instead of right-now transactions.

“We want to make the appropriate sale,” he says. “We would spend more time listening and probing to find out all that they’re interested in accomplishing and then applying the right solution to meet their needs. We like to put ourselves in our clients’ shoes and keep them coming back.”

HOLDING THE LINE ON PRICE

This holiday season, one way that big-box stores, especially, will lure customers in is through discounts.

Shor says the effectiveness of discounting long-term comes down to the store, its history in discounting and its customer base.

“Strategic discounts are always good to bring attention, but marking down all over the place, it’s much harder to come up in price than go down,” he says. “If an owner knows his customer base or her customer base, they’ll know what they have to do.”

Schiffman’s sticks to a rule of one price only, and does not discount during the holiday season, or any other time of year for that matter.

“We feel strongly that price is not the most important reason our clients make for investing in a piece of jewelry,” Schiffman says. “We know we must be competitive, but we recognize our clientele wants to get a good value – product that will last for years and years of enjoyment.”

At Northeastern Fine Jewelry, Bleser says that while certain brands, such as Pandora and David Yurman, are never discounted – there is more leeway to discount in other categories, such as watches.

“At the end of the day, if we had to come down [on price), we would,” she says. “You have to discount to where you feel comfortable.”

To handle price objections, Decker suggests “romancing” customers in three areas: the value, the reason for purchase and the beauty of the item.

Saying something like, ‘It can take a year to build a Rolex President watch,’ helps associates demonstrate that there is integrity in a piece’s price or value, Decker says. Focusing on the “reason” for the gift or the emotional ties between the gift giver and the recipient is another tactic, while romancing the beauty or rarity of the item is a third way to hold firm on price.

Whatever it is the holiday season holds for retailers, as Schiffman says, it all begins and ends with the relationships.

“When times get tough, you can sense what really is important, and if you don’t have tiffany jewelry on sale-rooted relationship with your clients, it seems that doing business is so much more difficult in this environment,” Schiffman says. “Where we do have those deeprooted relationships, there’s good business to be done.”