If you want to enjoy real success at selling stair lifts, first make sure your market has two things—an abundance of elderly or disabled people and many homes with two or more floors. Without that last one, you might as well be peddling air conditioners to inhabitants of the North Pole.

“My office is located in a place with the nation’s third-highest population of retirees, but their homes are all single-story, so, rarely do I sell any stair lifts in my immediate vicinity,” says Terry Mather, owner-president of Abby Lifts in Toms River, NJ. “However, if I go outside my town and concentrate on selling in cities north and south of me, I do really well because there I find lots of two-story homes.”

Mather sees demand for stair lifts going up. And up. And up. “More people are inclined to use them,” she says. “There used to be a stigma attached to them, but now people realize this product is just too convenient.”

Importantly, stair lifts aren’t just for wheelchair users. “They’re for anybody who has difficulty climbing stairs,” says Mather, adding that, more and more, her customers are people who have use of their legs but are older and no longer possess the stamina to scale a flight of steps.

Meanwhile, the image of stair lifts as a luxury only the rich could afford also is giving way to new realities, says Mike Zuckerman, owner-president of Titan Elevator & Lift LLC in Lindenhurst, NY.

“Stair lifts are now seen as a cost-effective product for keeping people in the homes they love,” Zuckerman explains. “That is something we spell out right in our advertising. In fact, we like to point out that it costs more to hire a moving company and leave your home than it does to buy a stair lift and stay put.”

Tricks of the Trade
As is true of other big-ticket wares in your product mix, good marketing is the key to sales success with stair lifts. Here are some ideas to generate transactions:

1. Advertise aggressively. For Mather, local newspapers are among the most effective outlets for direct-to-consumer outreach. “It all depends on what papers you advertise in,” she says, noting that small dailies serving a limited geographic area can actually be better than giant regional papers. “It also depends on repetition. People have to see your ad a lot—at least 10 to 15 times—before it registers with them.”

Zuckerman likes print outreach because his target audience—people age 50 and above—tend to clip ads and funnel them to friends and relatives who they think will benefit from the products shown. This enhances the value of the ad from Zuckerman’s perspective.

Rick Roenicke, sales specialist with Saginaw Medical Service Inc, in Saginaw, Mich, advises steering clear of broadcast advertising because those media usually offer exposure to too wide an audience for a product with a relatively narrow appeal.

Yellow Pages ads can be somewhat more useful; Roenicke says his company generates a sale here and there from shoppers who let their fingers do the walking. But, as Zuckerman notes, the problem with Yellow Pages advertising for stair lifts is that prospective customers do not necessarily know in which category the product’s sellers will be listed. If they do not find it right away, they may be discouraged from further searching, he says. To prevent that problem and to improve the chances that consumers will find your Yellow Pages ad in the first category they think to flip to, you need to place the ad in as many categories as possible.

2. List your credentials. In all your advertisements, be sure to say what makes you or your company well qualified to install a stair lift. “Safety is always a concern for people; you are essentially going to be installing an elevator, and people want to be assured that you know what you are doing,” says Zuckerman, whose technicians are certified elevator installers. “They are going to feel much, much more comfortable about buying the product from you if they see you have the training and experience to install the product correctly.”

3. Don’t limit marketing efforts to consumers. Saginaw achieves the biggest bang for its marketing buck by focusing on outreach to physical therapists, occupational therapists, and other health professionals because these people are in direct daily contact with the individuals most likely to benefit from having a stair lift installed. There also are potential gains to be made by targeting architects who design custom homes for the handicapped and the construction contractors who build them, Roenicke says.

Mather recommends also promoting stair lifts to city or county social services case workers.

4. Cultivate promotion partners. Arranging for local pharmacies to display your flyers or brochures on their counters can help promote your stair-lift business. “Some of the people going in for prescriptions will have recently had procedures like hip replacement surgery that leave them a lot less functional in their lower extremities, and these will be ideal candidates for a stair lift,” Mathers says.

Pin your business card or flyer on community bulletin boards at local pharmacies, grocery stores, coffee shops, and automobile repair garages. All of them are patronized by people who need—or who likely know of a relative or friend who needs—a stair lift. Posting on many bulletin boards is free, but you should ask the store manager for permission to add a posting before doing so.

5. Obtain leads from manufacturers. Many stair-lift manufacturers conduct their own consumer-oriented advertising campaigns and generate inquiries from interested patients, relatives of patients, and caregivers all across the nation. Those inquiries usually are disseminated as sales leads to distributors and dealers in or near the locale of origin. However, depending on the manufacturer, the forwarding of leads may not be an automatic process—or even an equitably administered one. Contact your manufacturer and discuss this issue of who gets leads, how and when, and make sure you are on the list to receive some from your area, Roenicke says.

6. Use leave-behinds. Never end a visit to a potential customer’s home without leaving product literature, Mather urges. Some buyers will postpone a decision to purchase, so putting brochures, videos, and satisfied-user references in their hands to mull over in the intervening days or weeks can keep a hot prospect from cooling off, she says.

7. Follow up. The prospect who hesitates is not necessarily lost. At least, not if you make a point to keep in touch with that person. “You will have people who will sit for several months on the information you give them,” Mather says. “But you shouldn’t let them slip through the cracks. You have to follow up. If I do not hear from a prospect within a couple of weeks after my visit, I call them and ask if they would like any further information. If they say they still want to think about it, I wait a month and then I send them a post card reminder of what a great product a stair lift is or I send them a flyer announcing a $100 price drop for those who buy during that month. You would be surprised how many people jump at that offer.”

8. Track sales by location. Whether you stick colored pins on a wall map of your city or have your computer provide a zip code-by-zip code analysis, it is a good idea to know from what parts of your territory your sales of stair lifts come. Only then will you be in a position to sharpen the targeting of your advertising buys and outreach efforts to concentrate on the most productive areas, Mather says.

Whatever you do to market stair lifts, keep at it. This product category is likely to be on its way up.

Rich Smith is a contributing writer for Dealer/Provider.

Photo courtesy of Adam Fine, www.AccessibleConstruction.com