As someone who reads business and sales books in order to apply the techniques to stripping, I was amused to read Ten Sales and Marketing Tips I Learned from Strippers.
Stripping is a strange hybrid of sales and entertainment. You can make good money if you’re good at either one, but to really excel you have to be good at both. My weakness is in the sales department. I’ve always been an entertainer, but I’ve never been very good at sales. I’ve gotten quite a bit better since I started dancing, though, and I’m always trying to improve. Fortunately for me, where my job involves sales it’s probably the easiest sales job out there. There’s no cold-calling, the customers gather in a central location to be sold to, and the majority of them have already made a decision to buy. The only thing left for me to do is convince them to buy from me.
How funny, I posted a link to this same article on my stripper blog. I just found your blog a week ago. Nice job. I agree with a lot of your points of view on several issues.
I DO think that you place a bit too much emphasis on the role of looks in stripping. Yes, it’s important for an entertainer to be attractive, but beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
Over my 8 year dancing career, I have observed that the most successful entertainers were not always the prettiest or had the biggest boobs. Rather, they had the ability to attract and maintain clients. Remember the Pareto Principle: 80% of your money comes from 20% of your clients. You are set if you can make a connection with 2 out of every 10 clients.
Well, like I said, I’m not very good at sales. For me I KNOW that looks play the biggest role in my income (personally.) I would like to get better at the sales aspect.
Take a stripper sales course. I had been dancing for 4 years and thought it was all about my looks. Then I took a stripper sales course in Vegas check out http://www.Dancerwealth.com
It totally changed my perspective on the industry, and my income tripled even though my looks stayed the same. More importantly, my self esteem was no longer tied to what I looked like or how much money I made. OK, I’m sounding hokey now….but one of my business plans for the near future is to begin a similar (but better of course) stripper sales training program here in Phx.
Looks will get you one or two dances, sales skills will turn those two dances into a 5 hour VIP trip.
I actually bought the home course last year. Maybe the live seminar is better, but I wasn’t terribly impressed with it. I think the only new technique I learned (that I hadn’t intuitively been applying) was assumptive selling. That’s not to say the most basic information wasn’t valuable, but I was already doing those things after less than a year of dancing (dressing more “upscale,” not drinking, etc.) In my opinion the portion of the course that dealt with sales techniques (as opposed to presentation and personal management) was just basic sales info with absolutely no tailoring to dancing specifically. If you managed to triple your income and credit it to Dancer Wealth, it seems to me you would have had to do a lot of work on your own to apply the techniques to stripping. If that’s so, I think offering an alternative course that would be more applicable to our industry and offer practical applications of sales techniques would be awesome.
Its so easy to strip. Ill give you a tutorial really quick. All you need is a pussy, boobs, an outfit that makes you look more like a hooker, lack of self respect, lack of respect for others, no morals at all, no dignity whatso ever. A bunch of sick men who are married (each with children they should be home caring about), and money that should be spent on his children but is going towards someone who doesn’t deserve it instead. Oh yea. How rude of me to forget. The mindset that this is a a profession when in the back of your head you know that there is nothing professional about it accept the money.
Source: I use to own a strip club. I’ve seen things I care not to see of again. I once was one of those people who called this a “profession”. I just needed some direction. It does make good money but its not worth it.
Bob: Sorry about your failed business attempt. For future endeavors, keep in mind that you will go much further when you respect your customers as well as your employees.