More Than Skin Deep

Back in the fall of 2005, Larry Gaynor enlisted the Gallup Organization to work with his company. The founder and president of B-to-B salon supplies cataloger The Nailco Group (TNG) had read about the firm’s extensive business consultancy, most notably The Gallup Path, a method that connects employee performance with a company’s bottom line. With annual sales of $85 million and a talent pool of 315 (at TNG, you’re not an “employee,” you’re “talent”), TNG is considerably smaller than most of the companies Gallup works with. Gaynor, however, believed that Gallup’s guidance on employee and customer engagement would benefit his team and, ultimately, the company’s customers.

Before training began, TNG already had made an impression on Gallup’s educators. “All of the Gallup team was so impressed with the people and their ability to get things done,” recalls Jennifer Mellein, consultant at The Gallup Organization’s Detroit office. “They already had that whole mind-set that in order to reach the experience that their customers want, they needed to do that through the hearts and minds of who they are.”

This mind-set dates back to 1985, when TNG began as a counter in a health and beauty store. Since then, the company’s catalog, The Industry Source, has served as the organization’s backbone. Circulation has remained steady at 225,000, as new salons replace those that have closed their doors. TNG since has expanded to offer products and equipment for nail and hair salons, spas, and tanning salons. The company distributes Beauty Direct, a catalog that mails to 1,500 beauty dealers and distributors, as well as manufactures its own product lines: FPO, TISPRO and Be Professional.

Focus on Customer Success
What’s more, TNG provides educational resources for its customers, such as the bimonthly The Industry Source magazine, as well as The Pavilion equipment and furniture showrooms, which are housed at TNG’s headquarters in Farmington Hills, Mich., Chicago and Fort Lauderdale, Fla. In addition to seeing products and equipment up close, business customers have access to spa planning and design services, and educational seminars focused on everything from massage to business management.

TNG’s average customers are women between the ages of 21 and 49 who work in salons, beauty parlors and spas, and enjoy working with the public. Gaynor estimates that 80 percent of the company’s sales are made over the phone, although all of its products are available online. The company sends out weekly e-mail blasts to its clients featuring information on new product releases, sales and closeouts, and classes. An e-newsletter is available to QE Club members, who primarily are nail technicians.

For TNG, the spa and pedicure products categories are hot, as is hair care. “We see a trend toward luxury,” Gaynor says, “so the luxury part of the business is doing very well.”

The connection between offering products and providing education is a logical one, says TNG Vice President of Marketing Lisa Phillion. The goal isn’t just to sell products; it’s to help customers succeed. “Every time you touch customers, you want to deliver what they’re looking for or help them grow their business,” she says. “We want our customers to look at us as the experts.”

In addition to its Farmington Hills headquarters, TNG has distribution centers in New Hudson, Mich., Kennesaw, Ga., and Santa Fe Springs, Calif. Sales reps work on the road in the state of Michigan, where the company houses several retail locations.

Atypical for a B-to-B, word-of-mouth is TNG’s best prospecting method, Gaynor says, nodding to the company’s 100 percent customer success policy. “We’re fanatics when it comes to listening to the customers,” he notes. “We do surveys, we ask them questions, we learn what they want and what they don’t want.”

Smells Like College Spirit
Gaynor heeds to a strategy for motivating and engaging loyal employees early on that hailed from his college days at Michigan State. “I decided to take my college experience — the school spirit — and bring it into the company,” he says. “If you’re an alumnus of a school, basically you carry that spirit through your adult life.” Much like colleges that have their own colors, mascot and fight song, so does TNG. The company’s colors are purple and white. Its mascot is the Rebel. At quarterly meetings, a cheer squad rallies up the crowd to sing the fight song. “It engages everyone, gets them excited and creates that learning, engaging environment,” Gaynor says.

Gallup built on TNG’s spirited college atmosphere. Its consultants employed a “strength-based” approach: They focus on where a professional’s talents lie and help that individual blossom from there. TNG’s sales team was the first to receive training; the middle managers were next. Gallup conducted a survey analyzing customer engagement. “All of those numbers are off the roof compared to our other clients,” Mellein says, comparing TNG to other companies Gallup works with.

Mellein attributes TNG’s success to its people, starting from the top on down. “Unlike other organizations,” she says, TNG’s leaders and employees “really created its own language around who they are and who they wanted to be to their customers. It puts them on top of their competitors in the sense that they created lines of business for any single type of customer need.”

Specifically, customers not only can access TNG’s product lines, “but they also have access to educational support, both on new product developments as well as business management,” Mellein points out.

TNG’s focus on its own people fosters the desire to get clients what they need, when they need it. “That translates to our external client,” Phillion says. “When you have someone else wanting to elevate you to a new level, then you, in turn, take that same attitude and it goes right to the client that you are touching. It’s all connected.”

Carolyn Heinze is a freelance writer/editor based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. You can reach her at carolynheinze.blogspot.com.