So Sick Of 'Word of Mouth'!

Perhaps you might want to consider transferring your website's phone number to one of those 'word of mouth' companies and track the activity for 7 days.

Follow up with them and then talk shop but be sure to ask them if they would like to continue receiving the calls before you transfer those same call to Joe Blow competitor.

I don't know much about salons, but where i am at
the owner "leases" the chairs and building to the stylist.

the stylist actually has their own client list.

Maybe you need to go get a hair cut. Talk to the person cutting your hair
and simply ask, hey, do you have enough customers?
would you like to have more? I can send you new customers
lets work something out.

Or ask them how they would go about selling the leads....

From what i understand a lot of them cut hair in different places,
not just one place, including some times, from their own homes.

Personally, I'd target a different niche. Paying for leads is commonplace for insurance agents and brokers of all types. Home remodeling/renovation, maintenance and repair industries are also good. I have a friend that runs his own tree trimming business; he pays five figures, annually, on advertising, easily. Take a look at Servicemagic's website and you can see actual businesses (sorted by industry) that are paying for leads as we speak.

I have a client that owns a salon and pays very well monthly...

You just have to present what you offer, in a way they understand. If they don't need new customers, move on to the next.

What do I do? Any help or advice is appreciated...

Make some more calls

Honestly how many people have you talked to?
How many salons are there in this area?

Its a number game for all of this stuff. A good majority of business owners like this are clueless about marketing in general so even offering them customers on a silver platter doesn't even matter to them. There is a reason why 9 out of 10 small businesses go out of business in 5 years.

I built a killer website demo (their website sucks and is full of errors) for a salon in my area and because they said money was tight, I offered it to them for a small hosting fee of like 29 bucks per month. That was 3 months ago and have never heard back. Another was gung ho about text message marketing and after setting everything up and trying to help them implement, they never did anything with it, even though they swore up and down they wanted to make it work.

So salons are maybe not the greatest niche unless you find an owner with a brain. But that goes for any niche I guess. When you do find an owner that "gets it", treat them well because they will pay you forever for your expertise.

The reality is, you will simply come across businesses that have enough business. Period. I mean, wouldn't you like to be in the same position yourself? I've known plenty in business who are busy enough. My mechanic runs a very professional, premium priced, profitable operation - you have to book well in advance. We chat, and the reality is, he can barely keep up with the staff he has. Moving to an entirely new premises and taking on more staff is just not something he wants to do. And, why would he? People have life choices to consider.

The economy is not exactly boom-ville (although we're a bit better off than our American friends), but there are still businesses that are simply busy enough.
Therefore, logic says.....if you try and sell "more customers" (i.e. that's your 'product') to a business that does not need more customers......well, it's just against everything logical. It'd be like someone trying to sell you a web site!

Is there something the salons need and could benefit from (whether they're aware of it or not) that you could sell them? That's a better approach.

I think you are targeting the wrong segment of this industry. Dressers who pay for their space and who will pay for leads/appointments will be hard to find. Salon owners who are building a brand are the ones you want to target. They can offer to help build the dressers clients as a benefit.

Well, I might have come out with a bit of luck on this one.

I had the meeting with this guy the owner had hired to manage the advertising/marketing of her 3 salons in our region. Now, this guy was absolutely loving everything I was saying, and even went as far to BEG me to call him before I had this other appointment with another salon owner (who wasn't sounding too crash hot over the phone).

So, I will hear back tommorow. I targetted salons initially for my rental site because there was virtually NO competition and I figured I would have some type of monopoly on the hairdressing industry.

Unfortunately, most hairdressers were happy with their clientelle or didn't give me a chance to completely explain the benefits. So, I have these 2 potentials left and after that I'm gonna have to start doing walk ins if they don't go through with it. (sigh)

I would be happy landing a BIG client though I suppose, would make things alot easier financially instead of jumping week to week on little sales ($600 websites). Anyone got suggestions for local industries that want websites and SEO's that pay big? (aside from dentists, tried that, will try again in a couple months).

Don't rely on one lead. Get two more today.

I agree that salons (nail and hair) can be tough but personally I've had some really good success with them.

Just like any business, they often go into it because they love doing it. They aren't always the brightest when it comes to marketing but that's ok because we just need to take some time to educate them and show them how we can make them more money and get them more popular. In my experiences, salons LOVE to be 'popular' and that's a fantastically magic word that I've used to close salons on all sorts of services.

I think I have close to ten if not more salons as clients for different services I do. They don't typically spend big money but some of the bigger spa/salons will especially if they're newer and have fresh loan money. I like to go right after them once they open.

An interesting co-incidence with this thread, in my private forum someone wrote this yesterday, which I want to demonstrate the point that they are NOT impossible to sell...

"I went out on my first cold walk in on 4/13 (a Nail Salon) and closed them. I didn't have any fancy pitch. I didn't have a website. I didn't have Bob Ross' sample cards. I didn't have any leave behinds. I didn't even have a business card for crying out loud. I was nervous and uncomfortable with my approach and my pitch, and they bought anyway. I literally had to write my name, phone number, the ad size they wanted, and the price we agreed to ($575 for a 3x2) on a piece of paper that THEY PROVIDED. For goodness sake, I didn't even have a sheet of paper or a notebook to write my contact info on. I did at least have my own pen."

UPDATE :

Thanks to all of you who put up with my complaining so far. Today was a great victory! I had the appointment I set over the phone and the salon owner was very impressed with my offering and asked me to do a complete website redesign ALONG WITH the SEO related services.

Although this means doing SEO for a new site and not renting out the original site, I might end up turning my original site into a hairdressing directory or something. Thanks for the support guys! That's a sale per week so far, not too bad for the first month or two of business.

I skimmed the thread and didn't see this brought up. But lets say word of mouth is working for them. Aka they are booked at capacity. And your site is getting leads. What does that say? It says their are customers out there that need to get their hair done that can't get into these salons.

Basically it tells you their is a market need. Can you fill it? Could you set up a salon and find stylists to fill the seats? If so you may be missing a chance to build a business on the side.

In our local market here there are too many stylists as we have a cosmo college locally. But in your market maybe there isn't.

Now for one of my classic outside the box thoughts. Why not try to find some smaller part time stylists that do it out of their homes? You could use your site and start as a true lead service. You could be their booking agent. Set up with enough small stylists and you could make a healthy service with minimal work for yourself.

Charge them $20 per lead. Yeah it might make that first time not profitable for them but it is all about repeat business and once they have a client they can keep them.

Or you could start a service where they call you to book always. You handle the bookings and they handle the clients and you have a contract where they pay you a percentage and/or monthly fee for this service. Maybe $50 plus 10% of said clients.

You could really take this somewhere but you need to step out of your box.

marketing and advertising are the biggest part of a company growing, although word of mouth helps it does not do all the work, i would never depend on word of mouth, even word of mouth many times does nothing, those are my thoughts nice topic to post about.

Word of Mouth is another way of saying - Good Marketing. People tend to believe it better than most other forms of 'advertising' and unfortunately a bad product can sometimes be made better by this strategy.

You can never bet against research - so before believing word of mouth - do your own research and make your own informed decision. Don't let others make that informed decision for you!