Never lose a client anymore thanks to the best Channel Sales Strategy

Never lose a client anymore thanks to the best Channel Sales Strategy

Jan 30, 2020 | Business Ideas, Launch Your Web Store, Sell Online, WholeSale Companies

Sell Hair Everywhere, thanks to the best Channel Sales Strategy

The right Channel Sales Strategy will help you to sell more hair and beauty products, because your products will always be there where your client is. Thanks to your Ideal Client template, you know where she is looking for information about her hair needs. What a petty if she finds an awesome Facebook posting with your hair, but you do not sell the hair on Facebook! She must switch over to your website. 80% chance you will lose her and thus miss a sales opportunity! That is so painful. But no worry, select the right channel sales strategy and you will never lose a client anymore!

You Know Your Client

When you defined the people on the hair market in need of your hair, there is a good chance you used the ideal client template. This template helps you to describe the client you have the solution for her hair needs. You know her demographics; like age, location and some background stuff as family and job. Or hobbies. The ideal client template will also tell you where your client is looking for information that helps her to find the hair she needs. This can be with her friends, on Facebook, the mall, Instagram or blogs. Everybody has her own preference to search for information.

You already use this insight when posting new arrivals, or a post about the latest trends of hair. You know that you must be where your Ideal Client is. Every time when your client goes online, or when she visits the mall, your tailor made message is waiting for her. By doing so, your hair brand will be automatically connected to the solution she is looking for.

For example, she likes to watch images of celebs with the latest hairstyles. Well, you have some posted on Instagram, because you know she uses Instagram a lot. She wants to read about how to maintain artificial hair. She will find you and your brand mentioned in a blog post, because you know she likes to read blog postings. That makes you the expert she will turn to if she has a question.

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If she is on Instagram, sell on Instagram

So far so good, this is nearly as good as the art of the deal. But the next step is to make sure your client can not only find the information she is looking for. You also want to help her to buy your hair regardless where she is. If she likes your Instagram post with a smile, she is ready to buy the hair. You must be sure you have a link or channel that will allow her to buy from you at the place she is. This is called Channel Sales Strategy. A strategy where you make sure your clients can buy hair at the place and time, when they are ready to make a purchase. No risk you’ll miss a sales opportunity anymore.

How to make the Channel Sales Strategy work for your hair brand ?

I recommend you combine the Ideal Client Template and the Shopify Sales Channels option to never lose one single sale anymore. Or better to increase your sales. The ideal client Template is part of the How to Sell Hair Extensions all-in-one hair business package, together with a mentor and a handy guide to set up your business.

Shopify has many options to link various channels. Today you can link your Facebook, Amazon, Pinterest, Instagram and messenger application with Shopify. And of course, your own blog. More options are available thanks to outside developers.

Imagine your client will not only see your brand when she is looking for a hair solution, thanks to the Channel Sales Strategy she can also buy right away.

If you leave a comment below this post, I will mail you, for free the Ideal Client template. This way you can see how the all-in-one hair business package can help you start selling. If you are ready to start selling, I recommend checking for the free trial of Shopify to make your channel strategy work!

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How a travel ban for Nigeria will impact your hair business

How a travel ban for Nigeria will impact your hair business

Jan 22, 2020 | Africa, Find Hair, Launch Your Web Store, Nigeria

Increase your inventory due to the Travel ban for Nigerians

Today Donald Trump has announced he will soon be imposing a travel ban for Nigeria and Tanzania. These countries are mentioned on a draft list of the proposed restrictions, also known as the travel ban.

A significant trade for Nigerians living in the USA is to sell hair and other goods in Nigeria. The same goes for people from Tanzania. Much of the hair is taken by plane to Nigeria as luggage and here is where the travel ban of Nigeria will impact the hair business.

What is the travel ban

During his 2016 campaign Donald Trump frequently floated the idea to ban all Muslims to travel to the USA. The first implementation of his travel ban sparked an uproar, with massive protests and chaos at airports where passengers were detained. The ban was also called the Muslim ban.

The current travel ban suspends immigrant and non-immigrant visas to applicants from: Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, Venezuela and North Korea.

There are two executive orders and two presidential proclamations about the travel ban. The implementation of this ban is not without legal discussions. The bans originally aimed mostly countries in the middle east, but now a travel ban for Nigeria and Tanzania is on the table.

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How sure it is the travel ban of Nigeria will be law

To anticipate if you must adapt the flow of the hair from the USA to Nigeria, you should follow the news rather close. The US government has already informed the countries subject to this extended travel ban. The idea is the countries involved should be in the position to adapt their own travel regulations.

This aims at measures like improved:

  • border security,
  • sharing of identification information among nations and
  • travel document security.

President Donald Trump told reporters at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that he’s doing it to protect the United States.

“We’re adding a couple of countries (including Nigeria and Tanzania) to it,” he said. “We have to be safe. Our country must be safe. You see what’s going on in the world. Our country must be safe. So, we have a very strong travel ban and we’ll be adding a few countries to it.”

Depending on how successful the Nigerian government can proof the progress in the steps mentioned above, they can avoid a travel ban for Nigerians.

How to avoid a travel ban will impact your hair business in Nigeria?

To keep your clients happy, you must be able to keep the time to delivery as short as possible. A travel ban will increase the time for traveling. You might need to go through more lengthy procedures, or perhaps even are not allowed to travel for a certain period.

Consider alternative logistics, increase the stock starting now, or purchase the hair in other countries.
We will keep you informed if the travel ban for Nigeria will become a rule that will limit traveling and how to deal with this. If you already have any question, please leave a comment below.

Cash Flow Forecasting will help you selling hair in Atlanta

Cash Flow Forecasting will help you selling hair in Atlanta

Jan 5, 2020 | Get Help, Launch Your Web Store, Make Your Business Grow, Prepare for the Launch, USA

Cash Flow Forecasting will help you beating the competition in Atlanta

Cash is the blood if you want to keep selling hair in Atlanta. You can only survive the saturated hair market of the capital of Georgia if you keep control of the cash flow. If you master the art of Cash Flow Forecasting, you will outpace the competition. And get their clients as a reward!

So, time for a dull but business lifesaving post about financials. I will make it as less as dull as possible, because I want you to keep on selling hair in Atlanta!

Sorry my Queen, but Cash is King

Even if you name your business “Queen Virgin Remy”; cash is King. Cash is the most important financial driver to keep your business selling hair in Atlanta. A cash flow forecast will help you to pay the bills in time.

First, we need to agree on what Cash means. Cash is not the profit you make selling hair.
Cash is the money in:

  • your pocket,
  • on the bank account or
  • saving account

you can use to pay bills or to use for household expenditures.

Profit is when you sell hair above the cost price of the hair and after you deduct all expenses. Expenses like:

  • the rent of your store on Edgewood Ave, Atlanta,
  • the shipping expenses
  • the invoice of the accountant and

off course the depreciation of the inventory.

You can make a lot of profit by selling hair, but if your clients pay later or you invest all the money you receive in new inventory to show in your store, you have no cash. You will have no money to pay bills. You might need a loan. So, profit is nice, but cash is better.

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The art of Cash Flow Forecasting for a hair store

If you do not have a crystal ball, you need to make some assumptions about what the future will bring. You will notice over time your assumptions will improve. The forecast you make about what the cash will come in and what will leave for your hair business will be more accurate.

Please understand it is all about learning, nobody will ever know exactly how much money she will receive in 25 days’ time. But more important is you start with thinking about the cash you need in the future.

When I was still at the university, there was a boy whose father died, and he left him a business. Of course, very sad news, but rather soon the boy had a fantastic cabriolet. Everybody was jealous. But as he used the cash flow of the business to pay for the car, it was a matter of a couple of months before he ran out of cash. Now he had to walk again to the campus instead of driving.

Take your time to learn how to enhance your forecasting skills and do not give up when you miss the forecast and receive less or spend more money. The only thing you shouldn’t do is to give up forecasting your cash flow.

Tricks to forecast

Let’s start with the reason you started this hair business in Atlanta. You want to sell hair. Based upon the market survey, your ideal client profile and your talks with potential clients at Cumberland Mall you have an idea what people want and approx. when they will buy the hair.

If you sell hair on credit of work with a layaway plan, you must minus the money when you sell on credit form your cash flow. The money you receive because of the layaway plan you can add.

But you can only sell hair when you buy hair first. So, you need to consider the time it will take you between the purchase of hair, assuming you must pay right away, and the average days it takes before you sell hair. The days the hair is on the selves, you do not have cash to pay bills. But you have beautiful hair to attract customers.

Now it also pays of if you have a good wholesale supplier, or more accurate, a good relationship with your hair supplier. If you manage to get some credit on the hair you buy you can free up cash. See if you can agree on the payment of half of the stock when you order and the other half a couple of weeks after you received the hair.

You can even accept a higher price for the hair, if you can sell more hair in the time you have the hair on credit.

Again, this all depends on the relation with your hair supplier, thus take this in consideration when you select the hair supplier.

Hair Cash Flow Forecasting Model

For hair businesses I developed a spreadsheet with a sales forecast and a cash flow forecasting model. These models, together with you learning to understand the cash flow of the business better over time will help you to keep on selling hair in Atlanta.

Darling Selling Hair Successfully in Africa

Darling Selling Hair Successfully in Africa

Dec 29, 2019 | Darling Hair

Home 9 Tag: Business Plan ( Page 2 )

Darling Selling Hair Successfully in Africa

Darling Selling Hair Successfully in Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa. They are planning to grow in neighbouring countries soon. Profit from the insight Darling gives about their successful strategy. This strategy gave Darling Hair Sales a stable double-digit growth. Adapt the strategy to your own position and give your hair sales a boost.

Darling shows Selling Hair at Double Digits Growth and you?

Darling Hair is a brand owned by Indian Consumer Product giant Godrej. Thanks to this Darling can show double digits sales growth year on year. This gives you a good benchmark to know if your hair business is healthy. If your sales show a growth of 10 percent or less, you can learn from the strategy Darling Selling Hair.

You should never copy the strategy from another company. But there is nothing wrong to learn from others. Especially when the other is the number One Selling Hair in Africa, Darling!

The Overall Strategy

For the Consumer Products in general the mother company of Darling Hair has defined the following. In bold the strategy formulated and after this a translation to your situation. This gives you great suggestions for your own hair selling business.

  • Keep the Core Business Healthy. This means you should always have the right focus on the business people know your business for;
  • Create New Growth Boosters. Plan to regularly launch new products or services;
  • Ensure Adequate Funding to Support Growth. Keep an eye on your cash flow, once a year scrutinize your expenses. Is the supply chain still optimal or can you make things more efficient;
  • Pursue Sensible Acquisitions to Accelerate Growth. Think about a collaboration with a stylist or salon to broaden your market and to grow faster;
  • Build a Higher Performing Organisation. Every day see if you can do things more efficient, logistics, purchase, marketing, selling, bookkeeping;
  • Do Our Part for an Inclusive and Sustainable World, invest and participate in your community

The strategy above shows you can not write your business plan and sit back and relax. You have to work on the company, the world around you, your clients, the competition and the suppliers, changes all the time and you have to adapt to this. Surprise your clients with new products or services. Look for a collaboration with a stylist or salon and work out together a new hair product or service. Do not do the numbers once a year for tax purposes only. But check on a monthly basis how your profit margins evolve, and your commitments where can you cut expenses. Start the conversation with the hair supplier and see how you can get a shorter time to delivery. Do not forget every morning to think what have I done yesterday and what can I do better or faster. And make sure the local community knows you care.

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How does Darling Increase Selling Hair

Darling hair is increasing the sales of the hair and growing their business because the follow the following guidelines (in bold). See my suggestions for you how to put this in place in your own business:

  • Invest heavily in the brand. Select your logo and brand and be active on social media and local events
  • Innovate Your Products. Make your products available for everybody. Perhaps you have to organize a special event near a college, or think about other payment methods;
  • Be Unique. Think about how your products can be unique in solving the needs of your clients. Remember you are not selling hair; you are selling an experience;
  • Disruptive Pricing. Even if you are a small player, if you have a unique service you can be the price leader for that kind of hair solutions;
  • World Class Package and Design. Have eye and patient for the details like packaging and design.

No need to allocate all your money to market your brand. You can also use the lost hours in a day to keep the conversation going on Social Media or in real life. Make sure you have an inviting and eye-catching hair style. Go to the mall or places your ideal clients likes to be and get their attention. If people do not buy from you, it is possible they like the hair and they feel they get value for money. But they can not find a parking space or they payment method is not convenient for them. Spend time and energy to look after the slightest detail on packaging and website design. All this will help you to increase the sales of the hair.

Let’s get digital

Darling understands they have to get digital. This is both the marketing and the supply side. They team up with bloggers to be sure they will reach their ideal clients. Clients will find education on the hair and maintenance, but also how to use the tools available. How user friendly is your webstore for somebody who was not involved in the design? Use social listening to catch new trends before there is a standardize solution on the selves.

But also, the shopping experience should be smooth and help your supply chain to be the most efficient possible. Consider a platform like Shopify that provides both Point of Sale solutions for your store and a webstore. But also integrated drop shipping and payment facilities.

See how one point for every sale helps you selling more
Thanks to the digital world we know much more about customer behaviour then ever before. Darlings keeps on working on better measurement and reporting of the crucial drivers of customer behaviour. Do not only use your bookkeeping to know what drives your business. Measure and report behaviour using tools like Google Analytics and the analytic tools of your webstore.

Darling Hair Supply Chain

What is driving you to success and allows you to scale your business is a very efficient supply chain. How does the hair get ordered at the wholesale store. Shipped to you or the fulfillment centre and delivered at the doorstep of your client? This process should have your daily attention. Reduce complexity because this will also reduce the number of errors. On your quest for hair suppliers, take into account their order and delivery processes. Are they able to work out a supply process that supports your business?

The future

Darling has selected the countries they see as the upcoming markets for hair extensions. Next to mature hair markets like Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa and Nigeria. They have identified the countries that will be interesting for the near future, because they see the hair market will expand. Think of countries like Mozambique, Namibia, Angola, Ghana and Senegal. They even work on new distribution models; this all could be very interesting for new entrepreneurs too.

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Ready to go for double digits growth and sell hair like Darling?

Are you ready to start selling hair or grow your hair business, leave a comment below or contact me on WhatsApp if you need any support!

How much to markup Donna Bella Tape In extensions?

Oct 13, 2019 | Find Hair, Launch Your Web Store, Prepare for the Launch, USA

Jenna told me, she started to offer Donna Bella Tape in Extensions. But the question raised, how much to markup if you sell Donna Bella, or another well-known hair brand? It will not take your customer a lot of effort to compare the price with the Donna Bella website. What would be a smart and profitable markup strategy?

There are two key elements to consider. First, what are the cost you have to bear for the tape in extensions you purchased from Donna Bella? The second question you must ask, what is the price range I can put for my services?

How much to markup Donna Bella tape in extensions?

What are the cost you need to bear for the extensions you purchased from Donna Bella?

Okay, we mention Donna Bella, but the following applies for all kind of extensions you buy from other brands. Donna Bella writes on their blog: “There’s no easy answer about how much a stylist should charge for a hair extension job.” But you want an answer anyway, so that is why I wrote this post.

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Purchase cost Hair Extensions

It all starts with the purchase price of the hair you bought from the wholesale supplier. This price depends on the quality and quantity. The more kilo’s or bundles hair you buy, the lower the price per bundle. That is economies of scale. Here you can make the difference from people who buy retail volume, say 3 to 5 bundles. Better to wait some time. Get more orders in from your clients and negotiate a nice purchase price per bundle with your supplier.

The payment transaction fees

Next to the purchase price, you have to pay for the payment services. Especially when you have a wholesale supplier from abroad.
If you pay using PayPal, there might be a 3 to 5 percent payment charge. If you use Western Union or Money Gram you will have a similar charge. The first, PayPal has a buyer’s protection. If something goes wrong with the shipment and you do not get what you expected you get your money back. The wholesale supplier has the opportunity to explain they did everything to make sure you received what you expected.

MoneyGram and Western Union do not have any buyer’s protection. This is a payment method many suppliers prefer. Because they do not run the risk to lose hair shipment and receive no money. This way of payment you can consider after you build up a good relationship with the seller. For higher amounts this is even cheaper.

So, on your notebook you now have two amounts.

  • The purchase price of the hair bundles
  • Plus, the payment transaction fees.

The shipping costs

You know buying from Alibaba or AliExpress will most often not charge you for shipping cost. Thanks to the high volume of these platforms, the suppliers offering their hair benefit from very low shipment prices. But please do not forget, if your hair has to be transported from A to B there are expenses involved. Sometimes these expenses are already included in the selling price, but very often they are charged separately. The last allows for more exact pricing, because if you agree on a shipment with more days involved you will pay less. If you accept no insurance of the shipment, again you will pay less. This freedom will allow you to save hard cash on your shipment charges. This is not possible if the seller does not separately charge for shipping, but has it included in the selling price per bundle or kilo.

Now we have three amounts on your notebook:

  • The purchase price of the hair bundles
  • The payment transaction fees, plus
  • The shipment charges.

What is the price per bundle after payment and shipping?

Now you have all the figures you need to calculate how much you need to markup your purchased hair extensions. The original purchase price, the payment commission or fee and the charges for shipping.
There are two methods to calculate the markup per bundle.

You can calculate with every order the total cost per bundle. All you have to do is to divide the total amount by the number of bundles you are going to sell. This will give you the amount per bundle that will generate not a loss and not a profit on this transaction. This way of calculation is simple, but you will have to recalculate your selling price after every new purchase.

Or you can estimate the number of bundles you are going to sell this whole year and estimate the total amount you are going to invest in hair, plus charges. If now you divide the total cost by the total number of bundles you are going to buy this year, you will have a stable cost price of the hair. Your cost price will be fixed for one year.

Please continue reading!

Be aware, you need a higher markup

Please, I hope you did not stop reading after the last paragraph. Because with the cost price you calculated you miss a reward for all the other expenses related to doing business. The rent of your store or supply room, the maintenance of your webstore, the fuel of your car for the home visits to your clients and many, many other expenses.

Luckily you started the year with a good business plan. So, you have a good idea of all the operational and marketing cost it takes to keep on doing the hair business. Every bundle you are going to sell should also compensate for these expenses. Here we use the same formula. You divide all the operational and marketing expenses per bundle you purchased. Together with the cost price per bundle, you will have the minimum price you should charge not to make any loss or profit.

Wait! Stop! You are in this business to make a profit. So again, you have to continue reading because now we are going to discuss the part where you are going to make a profit!

How much to markup Donna Bella tape in extensions

Now you will find out if you are a real entrepreneur. Because now you know the lowest price of the Donna Bella tape in hair extensions or any other bundles. With the next step you step in the footsteps of many great entrepreneurs. You are going to decide how much profit you are going to make per bundle.

Check the following post for ideas and support to calculate the highest markup you can charge.

post profitable pricing strategy

If you offer Donna Bella hair combined with a treatment, you do not need to inform the client of the exact price of the hair.

Offer an all-in-one treatment:

  • Donna Bella hair
  • install and
  • together with the best service in town

Now you can sell the Donna Bella hair at a higher price than the price on the website of Donna Bella. Agree? leave a comment!