When we first started Float On, already being regular floaters ourselves and being very familiar with the warm embrace of the post-flow afterglow, we figured that selling things to our float customers after they got out would be the easiest thing in the world.

We were wrong of course, but not because people weren’t receptive to our pitches.
Our customers WERE, like we expected, the most attentive and absorptive audience we could hope for.

It was us, the Float On staff and owners, that couldn’t deal with it. It felt weird trying to get people to spend money after a float. It wasn’t natural, even though we were selling them things like mushroom supplements, color therapy glasses, and books of artwork (which are things we love and use ourselves).

We were pulling people from a place of expansion, possibility, and growth and we were immediately thrusting them back into the standard, script-based nature of reality (note that we don’t have ‘scripts’ for sales, but just the process of typical retail interaction is familiar enough to us that it cues all of those pattens of interaction that have been subconsciously ingrained in us).

Although we’d close sales, and no one confronted us about it directly, we felt like we were losing repeat customers and word-of-mouth by not being as awesome as we could in this area. The bottom line didn’t really matter that much in our case though: we were going after this because of a much simpler problem. We felt weird, and even if it meant giving up some potential income, we were dedicated to making things run in a way we were comfortable with.

[as a side note, optimizing for what seems right instead of for profit is
one of the luxuries of being a privately owned company with no investors]

So the question became clear…

How do we sell things to people who will legitimately love what we’re selling, without feeling sleazy?

The answer was actually very simple, but before I get to that let me first fill you in on some of the less effective solutions we attempted.

We put our membership pitch in the form of a mini-guide (now included in our Marketing Package), and set it out on all of our surfaces for people to find. Our thought was if we could get the information unobtrusively in front of people, it would do the trick without being salesy. This saw moderate success, but no huge spikes in sales.

We rearranged our retail, put more on our front desk, and in general set it in more accessible and visible locations. This also helped, especially the front desk items, but again, it didn’t yield anything dramatic.

The real change came when we put the sales pitches back in, but switched them to BEFORE the float.

Now, while we check people in, we tell them about our memberships (and retail, if we have time).
They’re excited and eager to float, and they don’t seem to care at all about what we’re telling them. That’s fine.

Mid-float, when things start getting good, they have the knowledge they could be doing this more often for more reasonable rates. Then when they get out, the obviously displayed retail and the Ongoing Guide are familiar to them, and are more interesting to explore.

Priming is one of the strongest and most prevalent effects in psychology, and in this case, it is the key to increasing revenue, getting more satisfied regulars, and not feeling like a used car salesman when you walk into your center each morning.

—

Graham Talley, Co-Founder, Float On, Portland, OR

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