Ever noticed how some salesmen show you their blinds and dwell upon how much better they are than anyone else’s, but then price for something that’s much cheaper when it comes to “closing the sale”?
We’ve seen this a lot lately with the salesmen from one particular company…
They show rectangular Eos pleated blinds in a brown aluminium frame. It disguises the fact that the blinds cannot be removed without actually pulling the whole blind off – including ripping the screws out.
They claim how the solar reflective Crush fabric on the blind model is completely exclusive to them, with all of its unique benefits. Even though this is untrue and it is not exclusive to them at all.
Their website, brochure and photos all show the blinds with an individual blind layout (where the blinds are fitted to individual panes of glass) and where the window blinds all have a bottom rail, all of which makes the blinds look very neat indeed.
But when it comes to pricing…
They push customers to a small range of ‘easy care’ fabrics, with very different properties from the Crush fabrics they were shown on the blind models, but which are much cheaper. They are thicker, not washable and have a completely different solar reflective coating.
Apparently without telling customers the downsides, they also adopt a doubled-up layout with oversized roof blinds up to 2m wide because they are so much cheaper, even on UPVC roofs where the manufacturer stipulates that this would invalidate the conservatory guarantee.
They then offer 8% discount on window blinds if you have plastic feet on them, instead of the bottom rails that they show on their actual blind models and in all of their images. Of course they never actually explain the disadvantages or compromise in appearance.
If all these things are such a good idea, why don’t they show their blinds like this on their website, in their brochure and photographs, or even with their blind models?
Their quotations often range from as much as 20% higher than ours to as low as 20% less – it all depends on the salesman in question and how desperate he is. When we calculate what our prices would be for the same roof blind layout, the same Eos pleated blinds and the same (or similar) fabric, we often see that we would be much closer to their lowest prices.
This kind of selling is now referred to as a “2 bag close” – adopted from the principle of showing everything at its best from the first bag, whilst selling a much cheaper product from the second bag. It is commonly used by Illegal Street Traders selling fake DVD’s or watches and preys upon people’s desire for a bargain
We can only conclude that they think that this will dramatically increase sales, because the downsides to this kind of selling are very big and will surely result in a lot more dissatisfied customers.
Maybe we are wrong. Perhaps we are the ones that are out of touch. After all this is a very successful company that is much bigger than we are, with a level of professionalism to which we used to aspire.
But judging by the number of people contacting us to enquire about jobs, it would seem unlikely.
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