Issue 13 - January 2009

This month we are pleased and excited to announce the much-anticipated , release of our Room Design for Sales Associates training course. Sales associates will be able to begin enrolling in the course directly after the Vegas Market. For those of you attending the Vegas Market, we invite you to visit us at our booth and learn more about this exciting new course.

This new course is the perfect compliment to our furniture product knowledge and sales skills courses. It teaches furniture sales associates the concept of total room selling. Some lessons in this new course are as follows: Elements and Principles of Design, All About Color, Furniture Placement, Selling Accessories, Diagramming a Room, and many more.

This advanced sales training course will help your sales associates become true experts, not only in furniture product knowledge and selling skills, but also in the fashion and romance of helping customers by the furniture they need for the rooms they always wanted.

- Mark Lacy, President

In This Issue...

• Visit us at Market
• In the News: Furniture Style.com
• Tips and Tricks
• Beyond the Internet
• Did You Know...

Visit us at Market

We invite all of you attending the Vegas Market to please stop by and visit with us at our booth. We are located in the Western Home Furnishings Association Retailer Resource Center on the 16th Floor of building B of the World Market Center.

We also invite you to attend a seminar by our president, Mark Lacy, being given at the WHFA RRC, Monday Feb 9th at 8:30 a.m. The topic of the seminar will be "How to Better Train your Sales Associates."

In the News: Furniture Style.com

Recently Mark Lacy, President of the Furniture Training Company, was interviewed by Furniture Style.com on how to train your staff to sell effectively. The article explores the kind of experiences potential customers would like to have, what sales associates need to do to convert store visitors into customers, and the best ways for furniture retailers to train sales associates.

Read the article...

Tips and Tricks

Looking for additional training ideas? Be sure to catch the column of our own, Mike Petersen, VP of The Furniture Training Company. He now writes a column for the prestigious Home Furnishings Business Magazine. His articles will appear about 6 times each year. Look in the October and December 2008 issues of HFB. Watch for him in 2009 as well. So far he is in both the January and February issues.

Beyond the Internet

Using the resources provided by internet technology, The Furniture Training Company has delivered over 100,000 lessons, but the training does not stop at the computer. Every idea taught online is backed up by showroom exercises that help bring what the sales associate learned onto the showroom floor. In addition, The Furniture Training Company provides In-Pocket Reminders of important steps and study guides, which allow off-line practice and help. All of these tools will help your sales associates turn the knowledge they are learning in the courses into the practical skills they need to sell more furniture to more people.

Did You Know...

Japan has had a significant impact on the home furnishings industry in the past two centuries. Western designers have long admired and imitated the simplicity of Japanese styles. Many aspects of Japanese furnishings have been adopted into Western homes, such as lacquer finishes, futons, and the use of design schemes featuring simple geometric designs or scenes from nature. Additionally, Japanese manufacturers in the mid-1900s, such as Tendo Mokko, blended Japanese and Western techniques to produce pieces such as Sori Yanagi's butterfly stool, which is still in production today.