Training …Loss Leader or Revenue Stream
WNL Safety Products has been a leading supplier of first aid and CPR training products to both independent and national training organizations since 1995. In that time, WNL has become one of the largest original equipment suppliers in the United States. Since 2000 the company has served the health and safety training market, providing OEM Products to some of the largest and most respected training organizations, including The American Red Cross, The American Heart Association, National Safety Council, and others.
For more details, visit https://www.tdisdi.com
Bookkeeping
Well, it’s late April as I write this and the after-effects of the panic to get tax returns in on deadline is still fresh. With all that in mind, bookkeeping and its attendant filing, paper work, basic knowledge of federal tax law, state or provincial tax regulations and local fees and licensing , is a strong enough incentive to add it to the list.
Equipment Specialist and Service Technician
Since diving is an equipment-intensive pastime, the next item on the list is a given. Equipment set-up and maintenance is, or should be, a big item on the year-end revenue statement for a successful dive store, and so we have one more hat to wear.
Educator and Mentor
Does your store offer diver education? Of course you do. Formal education and less formal mentoring are part and parcel of being a member of SDI, TDI and ERDI so now issues with this list item.
Father Confessor.
I mentioned earlier I’ve never working over the counter in a retail business, but my grandfather owned and ran a couple of pubs and one of many “life lessons” he passed on was about having a willingness to listen to customers and staff when they had to get something off their chest. Never sure why the service industries seem to extend to being asked to comment on everything from finding a suitable university for Junior, to tips on training a new puppy not to pee in the house; but it happens apparently. In a recent study in small businesses operating in the Euro Zone by the Chartered Management Institute, an average of close to an hour of management time each day is spent dealing with personnel issues that fall way outside the purview of business. Add one more hat.
By Dennis Pulley
“The online program allowed me to work at my own pace and review the information without someone looking over my shoulder. I especially liked the way the program allowed me to work on my own time schedule vs a typical classroom setting. I was able to complete the pre-course studies according to my personal schedule whether it was two hours a day or six hours a day. The quizzes at the end of each chapter confirmed I understood the material and could not just can skip through it.”
Lincoln, NE
When it comes to Business Development & Recruitment the Size of your Funnel is so important!
Right about now you are saying what the heck is this about? Welcome, pull up a chair, open your mind, and let’s get started.
I am talking about your sales funnel in case you were left guessing. And the “Funnel” in this case can take many different forms:
You see each of these examples has a different type of “Funnel” and they each of them is doing its job. Look at it this way, if you are trying to fill a test tube in a rain storm a funnel really helps to direct more drops into your test tube?
Your test tube is the dive business you have been operating now for some time; and the rain drops are those most valuable of all assets; divers. Ask a group of dive operators who is their most important customer and they will usually reply new divers!
So how do you increase your open-water diver or entry level classes? The answer is simply to fall back on the long list of tried-and-true techniques that you have used before and tweak every so often.
Here are a couple of tweaks to consider. They are common practice but deserve repetition here.
· Push for referrals; but you must have a hook. Ask yourself why is someone going to refer you new business? Maybe because they need a dive buddy! Think as well: Divers buy boats! Divers book travel! Divers put aquariums in their house! Find a common denominator with local businesses and go for it. But the best referral business comes from your own students. How about a “try some new gear” party, a pool party, a tail gate BBQ, any event you can think of will probably work but you have to ask for the referral! One retailer put together a package with a pool builder that offered a FREE scuba Intro in their new pool! Good idea? Maybe you can work a similar deal with a pool maintenance company.
· The mash potato and rubber chicken circuit. Get out and make presentations. Talk to anyone that will listen. And at the close of play, do not forget to ask for the business.
· Create alliances with other local industry members. This means reaching out and creating alliances with some you may have seen as “fierce competitors” in years gone by. Reach out to HS scuba instructor, your local community college program, adult education facility. Yes, even independent instructors. In this economic climate none of us can afford to be “too independent”.
Remember your objective is to grow the circumference of the mouth of your funnel and catch every drop you can!
Let us hear from you and tell us what is working for you? What recruitment techniques are you employing successfully in your business? Now is the time to lean on your data base and to work it, with e-mails, reminders and invitations to nay activity you can imagine. After all FUN Activities are a great way to increase the size of your funnel.
How do you contact the area instructors and recruit them to work with you? No different than asking for a referral, simply ask them to work with you! After all the more Divers a community creates the more people that are out there talking about it the healthier everyone’s business will be.
Need more info on data base mining, see the accompanying article titled Developing and Retaining Long-Distance Loyalty: Do you do ALL you can?
I took time out from a trade show one year to drop into Saks on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. I wasn’t playing hooky – well not intentionally – because the show I was attending included visits to exhibitors’ showroom across New York, and walking from one showroom to another took me right by Saks main entrance. Anyhow, I purchased a really nice summer suit.
About a month or so later, I got a card in the mail from Saks explaining that they had just taken delivery of a range of “business casual” shirts that would work well with my new suit; a month after that, an offer on silk ties. I even got a card on my Birthday… suggesting a few things I might treat myself to.
Over the course of the next few years, I made other purchases and more postcards followed up. And as part of every business trip I took to NY, I’d drop into the men’s department in Saks and usually buy something. And bit by bit I became a regular customer in spite of making my home about an eight-hour drive west of New York City.
Today, more than 25 years after that initial purchase, I still hear from Saks about deals they have in their men’s department. Of course now their “calls to action” come in the form of emails, but the principle is exactly the same, and over the years they have done a great job of keeping me loyal.
I would have to guess how much money they have earned on their initial investment of a few minutes needed for that first sales associate to collect my name, address, birth date, and so on. I would also have to guess at the shape and size of the Sak’s customer database – or the ones I am in for L.L. Bean, Johnston & Murphy, Bass Pro Shops and so on – but it must be worth millions.
I would put good money on a bet that your customer database is not anywhere near the size of the one at Saks, but it is worth a considerable whack of money and hold the potential to make the coming year your best ever. You just have to invest a little time.
Now, most of you are meticulous when you process a customer sale be it for service, training, equipment purchase, or anything else. And you follow-up with seasonal reminders of the deals you have throughout your store, you let them know about special events like “try-it” gear days, pumpkin carving, site clean-ups and so on. You send them a card on their birthday telling them to drop by for a cup-cake and a special birthday boy or girl offer. You let them know about special trips.
No, this message is for the few of you who do not collect email addresses, street addresses, birth dates or even what type of gear your customers have purchased. YOU ARE MISSING THE BOAT, and kissing goodbye to good potential business, if you do not invest in a basic Customer Management System… even if it’s 100 percent manual.
During the past 12 to 18 months, I have spoken with a number of dive centers here in North America as well as overseas and without exception, the ones who are doing well, pushing 50 percent con-ed rates, and thriving even in the poorest economic environments, work hardest at building customer loyalty and following up on even the smallest sale… like the store in the North of England that collects email addresses from customers who buy a nitrox or air fill.
The most successful retailers make sure their customers understand that their contact details, and especially their email address, will never be sold, lent or abused, BUT THEY DO EXPLAIN TO THEM TO EXPECT AN EMAIL FOLLOW-UP.
We try to do part of that job for you. We send a monthly eNewsletter to your customers and we sent their invitation to download their FREE e-Zine (Underwater Journal, a Diving Adventure Magazine). And we try to drive them back into your store. But it’s up to you to cement that customer loyalty and all it really takes is a few key strokes and hitting the SEND button.
By Steve Lewis
We get a considerably varied and pretty constant stream of email into our office from divers across North American and from around the world. Sometimes it’s to tell us how pleased they are about the service they got from one of you folks. Sometimes it’s to ask about the quality of diving in some far-flung corner of the Pacific. Occasionally it’s a complaint. But from time-to-time we get asked to explain why we do things the way we do, and these are usually the most fun to answer!
Last week, I got a message from off one of the many scuba-related forums on the web that we monitor. Apparently this diver’s girlfriend had signed up for an open water course and he was shocked to learn that his local dive store had switched affiliations and was now promoting, what his old instructor termed, “SDI’s superior program!”
That happens more and more these days… but he asked what the differences were between the Open Water program he had taken through another sport diving agency and SDI’s. He explained that he was shocked to learn from his girlfriend that SDI promotes the use of personal dive computers (PDCs) rather than making students work through calculations using tables.
During one of our conversations, he said he felt she was being short-changed and that not learning tables was dangerous. He actually said “if sport divers or occasional divers can’t familiarize themselves with the tables then should such an unsafe person be diving?” Frankly, I was a little floored because it seemed to me he was telling me that ALL SDI-trained divers are unsafe, because their instructors have not made them slog through an antiquated system that most divers forget how to do unless reminded on a regular basis.
For the record, let me share with you want I explained to him because you too may run into someone who harbors similar misconceptions, and although I am sure you have your own version of things, the explanation that follows may help you sometime in the future.
Let’s start at the beginning. SDI is different to the other major sport diving agencies because it was created by people who ran a technical diving agency; the biggest technical diving agency in the world, TDI. The men and women who helped put together its curriculum and developed its courses had the strongest background possible in diver education and diver safety, and the attendee list of those early brain-storming sessions read like a who’s who of recreational diving… both technical and sport branches.
Their primary concern was to create an open water course that made diving an adventure rather than a chore, and one that had a sort of “sky’s the limit” perspective on diver education… after all, many of those early SDI instructors had experience exploring exciting spots around the globe that few divers had ever seen. The majority of them had been teaching people to dive in caves, and running diver programs to depths about three-times the “normal” sport diving limits. So their perspective on how far a student could progress was a mite broader than instructors from other backgrounds!
Right from the beginning, SDI brass determined that all SDI-level divers wear a personal dive computer. In the simplest terms, this determination was driven by safety, and not as my correspondent suggested collusion with the dive computer manufacturers! Personal dive computers have evolved immensely since the first brick-sized units available in the 1980s. They have become easy to read, understand and use. Their functions go way beyond those offered by their predecessors… for example, downloadable graphic dive profiles, and logbook functions. And, most importantly, they are the best tool currently available for controlling ascent speed… something we believe needs to be managed because of what seems to be a very strong association with bubble troubles.
Of course the core function of a PDC is to track average nitrogen loading in real-time and give a good approximation of the decompression status of the person wearing it minute by minute (actually, second by second in many cases). Because of this, among other benefits, a savvy diver is able to maximize her bottom time while keeping within the No Decompression Limits of her dive. No table can come close to this level of accuracy and, by inference, offer comparable security. The mitigation of DCS is never zero regardless of what method is used – tables, PDC or some other Voodoo – but for sport divers, a PDC is without comparison. In short, a PDC is an extremely useful tool within the budget of the majority of sport divers.
Of course the one important proviso is that when a SDI diver graduates his or her open water class, their instructor has helped them to understand the computer’s functions and benefits, and they have been encouraged to read the user’s handbook and discuss anything they did not immediately understand.
Now on the topic of tables. We do not discourage instructors from teaching tables, in fact all our leadership courses (DM, AI, OWI, SIT, IT) have components where the US Navy, DCIEM and Buhlmann tables are used, but extensive research has told us that sport divers and tables do not mix well. In fact, there are strong indications that unfamiliarity with dive tables among occasional divers keeps people away from diving. Because of this and other concerns about table use on multiple dives, CNS tracking and related issues that may have a negative effect on a diver’s well-being, we discourage tables as primary information.
The arguments for tables actually remind me of the arguments that are offered against technological advances in all forms of sport and pastimes, not just diving. I’ve heard people rally against seat belts and anti-lock brakes, airbags and traction control in cars. (Actually, members of my father’s generation despised synchromesh gears!) But of course these innovations are now standard in any late model car. They save lives!
The vast majority of ski hills don’t allow skiers on their slopes without modern bindings and boots. Leather and duct tape are no goes.
The list goes on and in our industry, there are many of you who may remember the cries against SPGs, BCDs and things that we take for granted now. The old way is NOT the best way, and thinking that tables are somehow superior for sport divers is simply nonsense.
Forgive the personal note but my wife, a smart woman in all but her choice of life companion, was terrified of tables when she first learned to dive. It was not the math or the process that scared her, she’s an executive with one of the largest hotel chains in the world and deals with numbers and process-driven protocols every day. What scared her was getting it wrong. She felt the penalty for a mistake using tables was so severe, she was reluctant to dive. A computer solved that problem… now if I can just get her to master the reverse frog kick…
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