Two therapists, same product, only one walked out with a sale
Hello my lovely,
I spent Tuesday morning at a client’s spa doing what I call a “silent walk-through” — I plant myself somewhere near the treatment rooms with a coffee and a notepad and just watch how the day actually runs. Two facials finished about ten minutes apart, two different therapists, and I ended up watching both retail conversations happen back to back.
The first therapist walked her client to the shelf, picked up the vitamin C serum that’s sitting in every treatment room in that spa, and said, word for word, “This is great for hydration and brightening, would you like to take one home?” Her client smiled, said “maybe next time,” and left.
Ten minutes later. Second client, second therapist, same shelf, same serum. This one said something completely different: “You mentioned halfway through that your skin’s been dull since you started that new medication — this is actually the one I’d reach for, for exactly that.” Her client had her card out before the sentence was finished.
Same product. Same shelf. Fifteen minutes apart, two therapists standing in the exact same spot. One sale. One no.
Now here’s the part I couldn’t stop turning over on the drive home: the difference between those two conversations had nothing to do with confidence, personality, or how well either of them “sold.”
It’s exactly the thing I started telling you about last week, when I first mentioned the Retail Masterclass for Therapists. The first therapist was reciting a fact about a product. The second was answering something her client had actually said, twenty minutes earlier, in the middle of the treatment. One of those is a script. The other is a system — and it’s teachable, to any therapist, whether she’s the chattiest one on your team or the quietest.
The One Thing To Try This Week: the callback.
You don’t need to wait for the Masterclass to start testing this. This week, ask every therapist on shift to do one thing: somewhere in the treatment, let the client talk about something specific — a wedding, a flight, dry patches, breakouts, whatever comes up naturally — and then, at the till, don’t recommend a product. Call back what she told you. “You mentioned your skin’s been reacting to the aircon on flights — this is what I’d use for that” lands completely differently to “this is great for hydration,” even when it’s the exact same bottle.
It’s a small shift, but it’s the same principle behind consultative selling that keeps showing up in the retail research — clients buy from whoever proves they were actually listening, not whoever recites the most product knowledge. Zenoti has a good practical breakdown of this if you want to see it applied across a whole spa floor.
So here’s my question for you this week:
If I stood exactly where I stood on Tuesday — quietly, notepad in hand, near your reception desk — how many of your therapists would sound like the first one, and how many like the second? And what would it actually be worth to your business, this time next year, if every single one of them sounded like the second?
Go stand there and listen.
Have a wonderful week.
Lots of love,
Marisa
P.S. This is the start of the conversation, not the pitch — that comes properly next week, when I open up exactly what the Retail Masterclass for Therapists looks like, what it’s costing your team not to have it, and how to get your therapists into it. For now, just go and listen at your own till point. You’ll see it within a day.
