Storefronts at the forefront

Whenever customers walk into your showroom or retail outlet, wouldn’t you like to have helpful, knowledgeable sales reps there to provide them a positive experience that begins with an order and ends with an installation?

Naturally, the size of your business dictates what resources you have at your disposal for training up your next trusted, reliable staff member. The type of customer you have also makes a difference when it comes to training. Are they consumers, contractors, builders, designers or architects, or a mixture?

But if you have 900 Canadian employees like Olympia Tile International headquartered in Toronto, Ont., does, training resources need to be a considerable investment. At Olympia Tile, roughly 45 take care of its 37,000 square foot flagship showroom, covering inside sales and the order desk. Consumers are welcome, but the giant tile and stone store also caters to designers and architects, as well as its traditional clientele of contractors and builders.

Historically, the very first ceramic tile wholesale distribution operation in Canada was established in 1927 under the name “Montreal Floor and Wall Tile.” This company was merged in the late 1950s with Olympia Tile, which was established in 1956. Olympia now has more than 50 distribution, showroom and manufacturing facilities that occupy overall greater than 4.2 million square feet of warehousing.

Olympia Tile vice president George Gal says, “When we hire people for the showroom we have them shadow our top people for quite a while.

“We have a couple of people who are just training staff continuously — showing them what the product is all about and how to use the computer system. How to act with customers and what to say.” Behaviour is very important, like “the importance of a smile and service — it’s probably about three or four months of intensive training before we let them talk to a customer.” He notes that while the company doesn’t typically put former installers on the sales floor, staff at Olympia Tile are exposed to “continuous seminars on products and installation methods, product uses. How to install, where to install, what to install, all of that kind of stuff.”

Another hard surface specialist, family-run Flesher Marble & Tile based in Calgary, Alta., was established in 1910. Early projects included the Calgary Courthouse, built in 1913. Since then, the company has continued to grow by offering the sales and installation of ceramic tile, granite and marble countertops and specialized furniture, epoxy coatings and bridge seals.

According to controller Claire Taylor, Flesher’s primary customers are commercial or commercial-based, but does “have a residential showroom that’s open to the general public.” In her 15 years with the company, she’s observed that Flesher has been fortunate to find sales staff who have a flooring background.

“We haven’t had to do too much training. Most of them have either worked for an installation company or they’ve come out of another tile company.”

Coming out of a flooring background, it is easier for them “to keep up with the latest trends,” Taylor says. “They get product knowledge from the vendors or suppliers. We do train in-house with regards to invoicing and dealing with customers. For the most part they are kind of left to do their own thing to see what works best for them.

“Because we deal with a select number of vendors, we can usually get them to come in directly and deal with our estimators plus the salespeople.” It is then that applications are discussed, “does it need to be waterproofed, is it a tile that is indoors or outdoors?” adds Taylor.

Certainly knowing what to ask the customer is just as important as any knowledge that a sales rep might have. Jim Duffus, president of Wyze Flooring Solutions in Saskatoon, Sask., another family-owned and operated business with a commercial and institutional specialty, says there are a lot of misconceptions about flooring that need to be corrected.

Wyze provides sales and service for commercial tile and sheet, as well as residential LVT planks and tiles, hardwoods, carpet and stone and tile.

“I think there is way too much sold on the colour and design,” says Duffus, “and not enough after asking the correct questions to give the customer the proper product that they should have.

“This lady walks into my shop and she starts looking at this nice semigloss dark maple hardwood. I asked her if she really liked this hardwood, then I start asking her a bunch of questions. ‘How many kids do you have?’ ‘What room are you thinking about doing?’ ‘How big is it?’

“One of my last questions is ‘do you have any pets?’ ‘Yeah, I’ve got two dogs — a schizchu and an 80 pound golden lab.’

“So I said, ‘Ma’am, you don’t want this hardwood.’ She said ‘why not.’ I said “after a month this hardwood with that lab running around on, it’s going to look like crap.’”

According to Duffus, that wasn’t “‘what the lady in the other store told me.’ My reply was ‘did the lady in the other store ask you all of the questions that I did?’”

The “other store” had not asked these questions, but for someone like Duffus, “she can believe who she wants to believe — someone who has been in the business for six months or someone who has been in it for 37 years.”

The problem as Duffus sees it, is that advice being provided by some sales staff which is, “in a lot of these cases, people that aren’t getting the right training. So many of them now have gone through the interior design thing and that’s how they were trained — as interior designers.

“The focus and their sales is on the colour and the design, not on the product.”

Josee Lefrancois, president of Mont-Royal, Que.-based Bamboo Design & Architecture, has a different training challenge to address. In 2015, it began the development of a qualified and diverse dealer network to build long-term relationships with its retailers all through an existing professional team.

The company, formerly known as La Maison du Bamboo (“sounded too much like a Chinese restaurant,” says Lefrancois) was established in 2006 as a distributor of quality bamboo products including flooring, plywood, decorative panels, veneer and bamboo composites for decks and patios. Maintaining a showroom open by appointment, its high-end customer base includes consumers, design professionals, cabinetmakers and contractors looking for eco-friendly products, says Lefrancois.

“If you want your business to work in bamboo you’ve got to coach people. Every retailer we start working with requires this. We spend up to two hours on some occasions just figuring out how people are getting into learning and asking them questions.”

Bamboo flooring products have had to fend off an inferior reputation, too. “Bamboo has been a victim of bad publicity because the product was brought in as cheap flooring and cheap paneling” that was not necessarily eco-friendly, says Lefrancois.

She notes that her retailers have to be trained to recognize that the wave of “low price with low margin” product has to be avoided by consumers and that certifications such as FST (Forest Stewardship Council), California air standards and Floor Score must be present. “You have to educate them.”

For bamboo retailers, Lefrancois and her team need to make sure they can inform consumers and designers about its benefits over hardwood, for example. “Regular hardwood you are not going to be able to install in a basement. You are not going to be able to install it straight on a radiant heat flooring. With bamboo, you can when its well manufactured, and we go into bathrooms and kitchens.”

The company’s managed growth and retail coaching seems to be working. In March 2016, expanded into the Ontario market.

Running a consumer retail outlet in the economically-challenged Maritimes poses its own set of recruiting and training problems, according to Glenn Burton, owner of Burton’s Flooring in the hamlet of Sydney Mines, N.S. The retail outlet serves consumers, local contractors and, frequently, designer-architects from nearby Sydney, N.S.

“In our area (of about 23,000), it’s hard to find people for anything really. The West has drained a lot of the knowledge out of our area. For us, it comes down to in-house training. We look for individuals that we feel we can train and like what they are doing here, and hopefully they’ll last. It costs a lot to train people.”

The company carries and installs hardwoods, LVT, carpet and tile. “I’m an installer myself — or once was. I’ve done both (sales and installation) all my life for 25 years. All of the installers here, I could put them in the store and they could all sell here, for sure. “Because most importantly the part they have is the knowledge of the installation part. And that’s kind of key in this business because if you can’t talk to someone about measurements — you at least need some kind of background in measuring — or a good math background helps.”

Adaptability is also a keen motivator for sales training in the flooring businesses, whether this is sparked by the introduction of new products such as luxury vinyl planking or competition from big box stores such as Home Depot and Lowe’s.

So, while Flesher Marble has been strictly a hard surface flooring provider for over a century, that has begun to shift and require another layer of knowledge to meet customer requests, notes Taylor.

“We’re slowly getting into the vinyl side of things. Our customers are starting to look for it so we are slowly getting into it,” says Taylor.

The same holds for Burton’s Flooring as well. “Today our installers have to be able to do more. If you’re just going to be a carpet installer today,” says Burton, “you’re not going to survive very long. You have to know more about the industry — you have to be able to install more products like LVT — its changing so rapidly.

“The same is being said for the sales side. You need people that are easily adaptable to different situations because here we run into so much with contractors.”

Canada’s flooring suppliers are somewhat divided between rural and urban, another factor that can play into the training equation. A company like Olympia Tile in a large city such as Toronto can specialize to a degree where one such as Burton’s Flooring on Cape Breton Island cannot.

“Out in our area consumers are relying on us because they don’t have the money to pay for that designer and they come to us for that design. We say this all the time, ‘we should be getting a fee for this,’” Burton laughs.”

Distinguishing themselves from big box stores, the owner-operated flooring outlets specialize in personalized, knowledgeable service. “If you go to Home Depot you’re just going to get the sales pitch,” says Burton, “you’re not going to get the nuts and bolts in my opinion. Flooring is one industry that’s still owned by a lot of Mom and Pops in the Maritimes.

That “nuts and bolts” knowledge only helps the consumer. “A lot of customers are misinformed about LVT right now. It’s a very popular category as we all know, but the consumer is out purchasing product,” says Burton, “buying inferior wear surfaces, and again, this is the training that we try to give our employees. To know the wear layers, to know the differences of this finish versus that finish because the consumer really doesn’t know. Feeling the flooring thickness, they think they’re getting a good product, or paying way too much for some product, especially at the Home Depots of the world or big box stores, and not getting the quality.

“For me, being a small business owner, I wear so many hats every day — you learn over the years and try to pass that knowledge off to people,” says Burton. “I know what works here for us wouldn’t necessarily work in a big corporation in downtown Toronto. Here we know most of our population, so it’s more about knowing people and helping them with their issues.

“So we look for problem solvers, versatile people that can adapt to the situation, can put their hand to something even though it’s not their job today — whatever that may be.”