At Beau Monde Spalon, in St. Johns, Florida, owners Carl Slack and Reggie Stephens realized that their staffers are exceptionally motivated by contests and competition. They recently ran a contest designed to increase retail sales, with successful results. The three top-retailing stylists were rewarded with an all-expenses-paid trip for six days to Goldwell’s Trend Zoom in Las Vegas. At the conclusion of the contest, the salon hopped right back into another contest, to demonstrate to technicians that even in a stressful economy, professional product recommendations will result in real retail growth.

“Our goal was to demonstrate that retail sales were there to be made and to redevelop a habit of providing consistent professional recommendation, even in the hardest of economic times,” Slack and Stephens say. The second contest ran for eight weeks, with the reward being an additional paid week off to spend with their family at a beach house.

To ensure they made progress on their goal of exceeding the previous contest performance, minimum requirements of $4,000 in retail sales were set. “As a testimony to what we had been coaching our stylists on, the winner of the first contest won the second contest; demonstrating that with consistent professional recommendations, you can continually retail professional products in a declining retail market, even over an extended period of time.”

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