CCA Global's Digital Focus for 2020

Bevin Andrews on Flooring America's Drive database — Bevin Andrews, senior vice president of marketing, Carpet One, says Drive equals sales, profit and success.

Flooring America president Keith Spano emphasized the importance of retailers meeting the needs of the “non-stop consumer”.

Flooring America's Drive database — Drive is a cloud-based customer database that serves as a place to capture leads, a conversion platform to convert those leads to opportunities, marketing and follow up automation for contacts, a tracking and reporting system as well as a floor management tool.

This year, CCA Global Partners is targeting what it calls the ‘non-stop consumer’ through a comprehensive assortment of digital services for its Flooring America and Carpet One businesses.

“The question becomes, are we future-ready?” said Keith Spano, president of Flooring America/Flooring Canada and The Floor Trader. “Are we ready to tackle the new consumer?”

This new consumer is what Spano and the CCA team call the non-stop consumer—the consumer that is looking for businesses to be open and available 24/7 through features like chat, appointment scheduling and online product portfolios.

“We want to make sure that we are blurring the line between brick and mortar and online, so we want to make sure that we are always open,” Spano said.

To do so, Flooring America is focusing on a four-pillar marketing strategy. “Together we are stronger, together we can accomplish a lot of great things and most importantly, together we have strength and scale to beat the competition and that’s precisely what we are trying to do with all of our marketing initiatives and programs,” Spano said.

The pillars include:

More turnkey marketing programs for members, making it easier for them to participate.
Being more data-driven. “We need to not only bring you programs that we think are cool, but we need to bring you programs that actually work and deliver results,” Spano said.
Wowing the customer. Spano explains this as the customer experience. “This is the open 24/7, this is the having great online reviews, this is surprising and delighting the customer.”
Drive. Tactics aimed at driving more sales, conversions and profitability.

With these pillars, Spano says there is no need for Flooring America members to go anywhere else for their marketing services. “Through it all, Flooring America has been leading the way with compelling merchandising, launching our vision and evolution selling system and keeping our members ahead of the curve in all things marketing. Differentiating our stores with an ownable brand positioning of being the most recommended flooring stores in North America and the place where friends send friends.”

A year ago, Flooring America introduced Drive, a cloud-based customer database to its membership. It serves as a place to capture leads, a conversion platform to convert those leads to opportunities, marketing and follow up automation for contacts, a tracking and reporting system as well as a floor management tool.

As of this spring, about 250 to 300 stores are using Drive, according to Frank Chiera, senior vice president, marketing and advertising of Flooring America/Flooring Canada and The Floor Trader. He said that the Drive stores are positioned to see about a 12.6 percent lift in overall incremental closed sales versus the stores that are not using Drive that are seeing about 3 percent lift in closed sales.

Carpet One recognizes that not following up on a lead is a missed opportunity, so following suit of its sister company, it has added Drive to its business arsenal this year, as a direct response to its members asking for assistance in capturing leads for their businesses.

“Drive is one of the most compelling things that you can do for your business today,” said Bevin Andrews, senior vice president of marketing, Carpet One. “Drive equals sales, profit and success.”

The time for Drive is now, as Andrews says digital is growing, both in terms of the number of leads going to stores as well as digital sales. “Why does lead management matter? Because more and more customers are buying on their very first visit to the store.”

Andrews says sales pros will get reminders of lead management status and to-do’s while marketing automation will help respond to leads immediately. Sales managers will have a dashboard to monitor the status of leads and whether their reps are following up. Also, Drive offers store owners a dashboard to see their sales pipeline.

“Like any retail business, any consumer-facing business, top line sales is always a challenge,” said John Gilbert, president of Carpet One. “You always want to get more, that’s the nature of us as business men and women. We want to do better, we want to grow, and we want to create better futures for our families. So we’ve done a number of things all around, including bringing Drive to the members to help them convert more leads to sales, which creates more profits and creates a more successful entity and co-op.”

Danielle Clair Simpson worked with BNP Media’s flooring publications in various capacities between 2012 and 2021. The former managing editor of Floor Covering Installer and Floor Trends has a degree in journalism from Eastern Michigan University and a master’s degree in public relations and organizational communication from Wayne State University.