Implementing tech within a small business: Connecting the Person to the Product

Last year I took on a challenge…

I joined the sales team of a custom Amish furniture business, who at the height of the pandemic saw a major upshoot in sales in tandem with the real estate explosion. 6 months prior to my arrival, the business doubled the size of their showroom, taking over the lease of the adjacent vacant suite and more than doubling their monthly rent. The real estate bubble bursted, consumers settled in with their new furniture in their new homes, and the business’s showroom was a ghost town most days. And a majority of the customers who did visit seemed to end up ghosting the business.

I joined as a sales consultant, seeing the opportunity to implement design skills, relationship building, and technology to add value to their business that neither online Amish furniture retailers nor big box furniture stores could compete with.

I researched competing businesses, specifically within the online-only sector, to gain more insight on why they were so successful. I also observed the behavior and answers to discovery questions of prospects visiting our brick and mortar, many never being converted to buying customers. The market research results were pretty clear. Our company’s showroom was being used often as a gallery for online shoppers to come in, see and feel the product in person, and then go home and buy it online.  The consumer was not seeing the added value of what our business had to offer.

Enlisting the help of an outside sales coach previously hired by the company, I injected design process principles into the company’s existing sales best practices and shared with other members of the sales team. The sales person became a major selling point of our products because the team was now also equipped to help customers with their big picture problem, designing their space. The relationship built between the sales person and customer had always been the keystone of our business, we just helped strengthen it.

I evangelized the power of tech, and helped team members increase their lead to sales conversation rates through the use of automation within our existing CRM software. The team started seeing results, prompting more engagement and excitement behind us working together to unlock all of the hidden features that our level subscription had to offer. (Thank you, Pipedrive!)

I found one more secret weapon, and this one was a complete game changer and a major money saver. Prior to this discovery, our company was allocating a lot of time and money to product photo shoots and a website overhaul. The problem was that we didn’t sell online and also didn’t plan to. We didn’t need to be spending money on those things. When researching competing businesses who utilized their web presence to sell their product, I noticed a pattern. Beautiful images of staged furniture that only a keen eye can tell is a render. These were expensive renders, and I was confident that online retailers were not individually paying for them. That’s when I dug deeper and discovered that these online stores were using a Saas that provided online galleries of products from participating vendors (Amish builders who do not have access to the internet). The service, called Viztech, would photograph the vendor’s product, create renders, and compile these Amish builders into a private portfolio that only Amish furniture retailers could access to use as attributes within their websites. I was able to get us in touch with the Saas (which is mainly paid for by vendors) and start advocating for both our builders and our business in a completely new way. Customers were blown away when we could quickly show them what their new custom dining set was going to look like in the wood species and stain color they chose. Combining this vendor-paid tool with our gorgeous showroom ultimately revealed the added value our business offered over competing businesses.

I am proud to have been part of a team that found a solution to a problem by advocating for both the business and the consumer. I also developed a new skill that I would like to continue to strengthen:

Product Strategy!