ETS Tanning Bed Blog

If you are wondering how you can make your tanning salon more profitable, you may be surprised to learn it’s not your equipment that is disappointing customers, but rather your front counter!

Customers often judge an entire store by their first minute experience, so you have to make sure that your sales associates are up to their task. In essence, the employee you have working your front counter is the front piece for your entire corporation for every customer who walks in the door during his or her shift.

Therefore, any tanning bed or tanning business questions they are unable to answer means (to them) your tanning salon is not knowledgeable, with an underlying implication that it is not trustworthy. If the employee is lazy or appears disinterested, customers are going to be resentful that they stopped in… and next time, they are going to go somewhere else. Even worse, if the counter appearance or the look of your employees is a mess you may even have some customers walk straight back out the door. Therefore, you must make sure your counter staff knows what is going on to prevent these scenarios from happening.

There are plenty of tanning industry training opportunities available for employees with potential, but just need a little more guidance. You could send them to the ITA show, NTTI, SmartTan training, or have an ETS Tan industry specialist come to the shop for a meeting/training. However, this can be very expensive for a small tanning salon to afford on a regular basis. Therefore, if you are not a chain tanning salon, you may choose to attend these events yourself and make sure you personally brief all your employees on everything you learn that you think is new and fresh information.

Don’t follow the “easy road” to failure… please, train your counter staff to do more than collect money and clean tanning beds. Create a checklist to keep them busy so that they give off an impression of importance to the customers, which in turn will make them hold your business in a higher esteem. At the very least, counter people should always keep their areas fresh and clean and be responsible for cleaning up any messes that may get drawn into the shop lobby from people’s shoes or clothes.

Finally, remember to tell them to turn on their personal glow with a smile. People go tanning for the warmth and relaxation as well as the tan, so make sure your counter person is helping them achieve their goal to the fullest!</font>