TRACK 2: PRINT MUSIC IN THE
LESSON STUDIO
PETE GAMBER, TEACHER
Pete Gamber owned Alta Loma Music
in Rancho Cucamonga, CA from 1978
to 2012 and continues to teach in-store
music lessons six days a week. Through his
nearly 40-year career, the regular NAMM
U presenter says he has been continually
surprised that stores often don’t have a strategy to turn students
into customers on the sales floor and vice versa.
“Most stores aren’t selling print to their students. They are
assuming they are selling print to their students and they’re
assuming students are going to walk in and go, ‘Oh, I’m in a music
store, I think I’ll buy the books,’” he says.
Gamber says he and his wife used to make the same
assumption when they owned Alta Loma Music and served 2,000
students per week. “If they didn’t walk into the room with books,
half the teachers didn’t say they needed to get books. They
would pull out a piece of pad paper or manuscript and scribble
something down for the kid. So I think that is the first mistake is
we’re assuming we’re selling to our students.”
Of course, in the scenario Gamber describes, part of the
challenge is that teachers don’t want to be salespeople or feel
like they’re pushing products on their students. Taking a note
from universities and colleges that require students to purchase
specific text books before classes begin, Gamber’s suggestion is
to set students up with the resources they’ll need to get the most
out of their lessons ahead of time.
“If you were beginning piano and you were age six and we
signed you up with Mary to teach, we knew these are the books
Mary used for beginners who are six years old. When you came
TRACK 3: PURPOSEFUL
PROMOTIONS: PLANN ING
AND EVALUATING YOUR
PROMOTIONS
KRISTA HART, TRADE MARKETING
MANAGER AT ALFRED MUSIC
Alfred Music’s Krista Hart will be discussing
how retailers can best plan and evaluate
their promotions – whether they be email campaigns, in-store
events, convention booths, or various sales – based on the use of key
performance indicators (KPIs) and, more importantly, a clear vision
of the promotion’s purpose and goal. And that doesn’t always mean
more sales.
“My presentation does include some specific KPIs, but it’s really
about offering a plan of action for determining your own indicators
based on the goals of your company and your promotion,” Hart tells
CMT. “The first step is to identify the company’s overall goals, then
identify goals for the promotion that align with those company goals.
Next, you create KPIs that will measure the success of the campaign.
The KPIs need to be a mix of leading and lagging indicators. The
leading indicators are factors you can control and that can help you
in for the lesson, before the lesson, we’d say, ‘Get here 15 minutes
early and there are books we’re going to get you set up with so
you can be successful.’ We would sell the books and then they’d
walk into their lesson and they’d be ready to go and Mary would
be happy that the kid had the right books,” Gamber recalls of his
system. “Mary didn’t have to sell the books and she didn’t have to
explain, ‘Why do I have a technique book and a lesson book and
a song book?’ It was done for her and Mary didn’t have to wander
out onto the floor.”
On the flipside of that equation are print customers who
aren’t taking lessons. “I’m in stores all the time still and I hear
people come in and go, ‘I’m looking for a good book to teach
myself guitar’ or ‘I’m looking for a good book to teach myself
piano’ and I hear, ‘Here’s three or four books over here we have
in stock.’ The words never come out, ‘You know we offer lessons
here?’” says Gamber. “We’re assuming people will walk in the store
and, just like we assume we’re going to sell books, we assume
somebody looking for books is going to ask us if we teach.”
One of the techniques Gamber advises is to say something
like, “‘This is a book a lot of our guitar teachers use and they
have a lot of success with what we do.’ I actually used to have,
underneath the racks with the books, a space without a book
that had the flyers for the guitar teacher with the books that
they like to use,” Gamber says. “I found that over a third of the
times people would say, ‘Well maybe I should just get some
lessons,’ because I always said, ‘A month of lessons will get you
off on the right foot versus having to come in six months from
now and someone has to redo the way you’re putting your
thumb around the neck of the guitar and now it’s in the way.’ A
lot of times the person would say, ‘Well when is he available?’
and I’d get a lesson signup just because they came in for a book
and I asked the right question.”
improve performance. Analyzing, not just collecting data, is the final
step – learning how to craft a better promotion each time.”
When it comes to measuring a promotion’s success, beyond
just sales, Hart notes that this is very hard to do if the company hasn’t
clearly outlined its goals for the promotion ahead of time. After all,
if there are not clearly-defined goals, what are the results measured
against? “I think our default metric is sales – which, of course, are very
important – but I want to suggest thinking about measuring leading
indicators that can be adjusted to actually increase sales,” explains
Hart. “For example, you are hosting a reading session and your goal
is to increase attendance by 10 per cent. Some leading indicators
to measure might be social media engagement with posts about
the event, the number of first-time attendees, number of outgoing
phone calls to target teachers, registrations per employee, or any
activity that you can identify as impacting the number of registrants.”
Achieving success is also more likely if the promotion is
planned with an objective in mind, rather than saying, generally,
what the goal should be when the promotion is already planned.
“Knowing what your company goals are before you begin is crucial,”
she says. “From there, you want to build a promotion that supports
those goals. You have to be disciplined about saying no to anything
that doesn’t align with the company goals.”
Michael Raine is the Senior Editor of
Canadian Music Trade.