The other day, my local paper, The Greensboro News & Record, carried a story about a local store called Rose Furniture. I’ve lived in Greensboro, NC for 30 years and the economy has been run by three things for a lot longer than that. For years, the big industries have been Textiles, Tobacco and Furniture. They’re all facing BIG changes. Textiles have moved out of the country. We all know about the challenges the Tobacco industry is dealing with. And Furniture is facing huge changes of its own.

Rose is an 81-year-old family-run furniture store. It’s certainly not the first furniture store to go out of business recently. In fact, it’s one of many. Jason Harris is the vice president of sales and marketing at another furniture store across town called Furnitureland South– it’s thriving. He said that the retail furniture business has gone through drastic changes recently. Because overseas furniture companies with lower costs have forced a lot of domestic furniture manufacturers out of business, it takes longer for the goods to arrive. That means longer waits for customers. That doesn’t mesh with the current trend of consumers deciding to buy something one minute and expecting to have it the next.

The question is, how can salespeople reconcile slow delivery with customer demands? The answer: by managing them. In my latest book How to Sell at Margins Higher than Your Competitors, I talk about the fact that we teach our customers how to buy from us. How do your customers buy from you? Do you need to change? Do you know how?

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