Britt Seva: What is up and welcome back to the Thriving Stylist Podcast. I’m your host, Britt Seva, and I am here with a very special bonus podcast as a part of our 12 Days of Gifting celebration. Today, we are pulling back the curtain and sharing a lesson straight out of my Thriving Stylist Method program. This is just one teeny tiny piece of the type of content that Thrivers know and love. And I hope for those of you who are already Thrivers, this reminds you of the high-level content that’s waiting for you in your modules and motivates you to push 2023 your most strategic year yet.
For those of you who aren’t Thrivers yet, this is a fun sneak peek into some of the step-by-step deep-dive, highly-strategic content waiting for you in the program.
If you are looking for serious business coaching in 2023, you want to check out the industry’s largest and most comprehensive training. Hit me up in the DMs on Instagram by DMing the word THRIVE, write to me @brittseva or @thethrivingstylist. If you DM me the word THRIVE on Instagram, we’ll hit you back to learn more about your business and the perfect path to achieve your 2023 goals. Enjoy this bonus podcast and to learn more about this and all our other 12 Days of Gifting offers, follow me on Instagram for all the goodness. I’ll see you in there.
Welcome back. I want to talk about creating connection for your guests through the four communication styles and what it means to have a closing consultation with your clients.
Now, confession, I’m a huge introvert naturally. Even learning to carry on conversation with my clients took a really long time. I had to understand how to do it well and how to do it in a way that a guest actually appreciated.
Some guests like hearing you talk about yourself the whole time. A lot don’t. Learning for me to turn the conversation towards the guest and how to navigate that conversation well from start to finish took some time. It’s a skill and I want to share some tactical tools with you to help make that as easy as possible so that you can build trust and retain.
Now, as I mentioned earlier, most people feel the conversation has gone best when they get to walk away as the person who did most of the talking.
So you, as the stylist, generally speaking, shouldn’t be the one doing most of the talking. Every once in a while, you’ll get a shy or quiet client who wants you to be the talker and that’s totally okay. But 70–80% of the time, the opportunity should be given for the guest to hold the conversation.
The goal becomes connect, listen, and encourage.
What worked really well for me was to make a list of go-to open-ended questions: in-the-moment plans, short-term plans, and long term plans. Essentially, I was hosting them in a conversation talk about what’s now, what’s happening soon, and what’s happening further down the road. It almost always starts with a question like, “How’s your day been so far?” Often, that would lead into an entire conversation. The guest responds to that question and says, “Oh, it was good. I went to Trader Joe’s, then I went to pick up my dry cleaning.”
That is enough for me to keep a whole conversation going. If her day started with going to Trader Joe’s, I would say, “Oh my gosh, I was just there last week and you’ve got to try the coconut milk ice cream.” That would lead into an entire conversation in and of itself.
Once we wrapped up talking about the now, I might project forward and ask things like, “Do you have any plans this weekend?” “How are you feeling about the holidays?” “Where are you going for the summer?” “Do you have any vacations coming up?” “How are you guys feeling about XYZ going on in the community?” Asking open-ended questions and then looking for trigger points as they answer is how you’re going to keep a conversation in flow and keep it centered around the guest versus you always being the storyteller.
Next, we always want to create commonalities as we’re building trust. As soon as anybody feels like they have a commonality with us, it’s like a trust building block. You can add blocks to that stock any time you’d like.
For example, I happen to be a huge professional baseball, basketball, and football fan. So, if I had a quest in my chair who I thought might be into local pro sports, I would just say, “Hey, did you happen to watch that game last night?” And yet again, that would often open the door to us talking about our most epic experiences seeing a game live or chatting even about our kids playing sports.
We as humans bond over commonality. That commonality builds the trust. Try this as you see your guests coming in this week. Here are some really good phrases to get you started.
If the guest says anything, respond by saying, “I completely relate because…” Foundational commonality. “Oh, I’m growing my hair out too! How funny. How’s that been going for you?” Commonality. “Oh my goodness, I just went to that restaurant last week. Did you get a chance to try…” Commonality. Things like that.
The more commonalities you can create, the deeper the bond begins to strengthen.
Now, the way each guest will want to talk and relate varies on the four main social types that exist within our community currently.
We talked about conversation sparks. We talked about commonalities. But the way that we relate in detail to each guest will shift based on the four main social types that exist in our society today. We have amiables, expressive, analyticals, and drivers.
Let’s start with the most common. We’ve got our amiables. Amiables are easygoing and friendly, which sounds great on the surface level, except that kindness comes with much risk. Amiables are the ones who will say, “Oh, do whatever you want. Do whatever you think. I don’t care, I trust you completely.” The reality is they only trust you to a point, but if you do something wrong, they’re likely to be the most upset.
The risk with amiables is that they’re people pleasers. They often say what they think you want to hear or they’re trying to just keep things less tense by choosing to be agreeable rather than being actually honest.
In a consultation, you need to get amiables talking a ton. If a guest ever says, “Do whatever you want,” your response must be, “Well, this isn’t about what I want. I’m here to share my opinion but I want this to be about what you want today, so let me help to get you there.”
Amiables are sweet, loyal, agreeable, but it’s crucial to keep them talking. They’re well-networked and if you mistake their kindness for weakness, you’ll be ruining your community reputation. Asking deeper questions as we talked about in the last lesson will help you navigate amiables without too much of a challenge.
Let me give you an example of a typical amiable visit turned south. Have you ever consulted with a guest, did their hair, they were completely happy in the salon, then the next day, they called you for a redo, saying that it isn’t what they wanted, you miss the mark. Their friend told them it looked bad?
Very typical amiable. Either they weren’t clear and were remorseful, but couldn’t tell you to your face that they were frustrated so they waited ‘til they got home. Likely they got tearful, highly emotional, and very upset because they were so disappointed. Then when somebody else, an outsider, told them they didn’t like it, again, that goes against the amiables’ natural tendency to please people. Now their friend doesn’t like it, there’s displeasure. The amiable is upset. This is very common. In order to reduce the chances of that happening, asking better questions, asking, “Tell me more,” is going to help you to rein all those amiables right in.
Next, we have our expressives. Our expressives are chatterboxes. They’re often your louder guests, they want to entertain the whole room. They love to talk. They’re friendly, they’re opinionated. These people need as much information as possible when they’re in your chair.
Now, the thing about expressives is they’ll keep talking as long as they’re allowed to but all they really want at the end of the day is conversation. They like being talked to as much as they like being the talkers.
When you’re having a consultation, if you get a guest who’s very gregarious, laughing, loud, just seems like so much fun, super chatty, you need to rein them in a little bit. Your job is to bring the focus to an expressive. Let them talk but they also need you to be relaying the plan back to them over and over and over. Because they’re expressive, their brain is moving very fast and they need to be reinformed of what you’re talking about with focus as often as possible. We discussed this in the last lesson when I was talking about our oral learners. Your expressives are likely oral and verbal, and you need to meet them in the middle on that.
Because these expressives are often the ones that will tell you the long story for the entire length of the visit, it’s okay for you to say, “Hey, you know what? You hold on a minute, I’m going to interrupt you real quick,” and bring the focus back to the visit. You can interrupt their story about the dinner they made last night and ask them if this is the right length for their cut or if the color is still feeling good. Or “Can I have you look at this?” or “I want to talk to you about the product I’m using on you right now.” Interrupt them. They’re used to being interrupted, trust me, it happens to them all the time. It’s okay and you need to take the lead on this. You don’t have to worry about interrupting the expressive so long as what you’re interrupting with is to-the-point and useful information.
Then we’ve got our analyticals and analyticals can be a little tricky ‘cause we often feel judged by the analytical. Don’t worry, they’re not judging you. They just really need the details. Analyticals don’t want the big picture. They don’t want the sweeping concepts, fancy verbiage. They don’t want you to say, “Trust me, this is going to be good.” They want the nitty gritty details. They want the exact process. They need to know what the final result will be upfront.
Have you ever had a guest who says, “How many foils are you planning to place today?” That’s an analytical. An analytical needs to know all the answers, the entire process. “How long is this going to take? When do I need to come in next?” Those are very analytical questions. You can’t speak in broad terms to these people. They need the facts. Let them know step-by-step what is needed, what to expect, when to return, what the next step is going to look like for the next six months.
I want you to imagine all of your guests are analytical to that level. The more information in detail that you can share, the better, and the more likely you are to build trust and retain.
Last but not least, we have our drivers. Drivers can feel really intimidating, but they actually can be some of your best guests so long as you learn to manage them.
Drivers like to be in complete control and they can easily take over a situation. It’s all about them and they don’t like the overly emotional, fluffy stuff. They like it factual, just like the analytical does, but analyticals are actually a bit softer. Drivers are our clients who can be a little bit intimidating, especially if you’re more of an amiable personality type.
Drivers appear like control freaks, but they actually enjoy being told what to do for once. They are so used to being in the driver’s seat that they respect when somebody for once is able to take the lead. They want a stylist or barber who is deeply confident and is not intimidated. They need you to maintain control and stay factual the entire time.
With a driver, you have to match their tempo and be even more in control than they are. Stay strong and always appear to be the expert in every situation.
Okay, so we’ve talked about the four learning styles. We’ve talked about four personality types. How does this all come together? How are you supposed to remember all of this? Now you’re supposed to analyze every guest that sits in your chair like that?
No way. The easiest way to make sure that you hit all of these points is to just create a system for every guest who walks through the door. Be analytical with everybody. Be confident with everyone. Ask questions like, “Tell me more,” or “I’m here to guide you along this process.” Show physical examples. Make sure they’re touching their hair. Be a good oral educator. Be a good verbal educator. Be a good physical educator. Hit all of the key points.
Rather than trying to custom-tailor this to each guest, my ask of you is to build the trust by elevating the consultation and the conversation as a whole. Because if you can do that, you’re going to become a referral and retention magnet.
Okay, so we’ve talked about initial consultations. We’ve talked about communication styles. Now we’ve got to talk about the secret sauce: closing consultations.
Most everybody in the industry offers an initial consultation, does the work, says, “Do you like it?”, and calls it a done deal. Think again. The goal is to build trust.
And we can do better than, “Do you like it? See you next time.” Instead, when you finish a guest, before you remove the drape, I want you to maintain control of the conversation and I want you to say, “All right, I want to touch base with you as we wrap up this visit. How do you feel about this final style, cut, color,” or whatever it is that you just finished. “How do you feel about it?” Have them run their hands through their hair. Make them do it. This is so important, especially for our physical learners. We want to be sure we hit all of the learning styles here to build that physical, emotional, and verbal trust, right at the very end.
Here’s what I want you to do. Ask them what their favorite part of today’s look was, ask if they have any questions, and then share what you like best about their new look. If we can get them to touch their hair, share what they like best, and hear what you liked best, we’re going to end up hitting all four of the learning styles, psychologically telling the guests, “Wow, this person really nailed it,” it is a simple, small psychological trigger that most stylists and barbers never tap into and it is really powerful.
Okay, you did it. You built the entire trust path. We hit who you are, what you do. We helped our guests get started with as quickly and stress-free. We welcome them to our business, communicated well. Now you’re on the right track to building a solid and sustainable clientele.
Now it’s time to shift our focus to the Interest level where we can start driving fresh eyes and traffic to your chair. Great work, and I’ll see you on the next one.
