t’s the great dichotomy: One of the most popular times to use a hot tub is on a winter evening. But most dealers will tell you that the winter months are the most challenging time of the year to sell a hot tub.

Several factors combine to create this slowdown. Chief among them is the weather. Customers tend to stay home when temperatures drop and snow falls. Also, frozen ground keeps contractors from installing some spas.

Then there’s the holiday season, when potential customers think more about playing Santa than soaking in a spa. “People have other things on their minds, so they tend to put off major ticket items until later,” says Brad Kelly, a salesman at Anchor Aquatech in Yorktown, Va.

To some degree, the winter break is welcome. When the weather outside is frightful, the sales staff inside can spruce up the showroom, plan for the approaching madness of spring and summer, and even carve out a week or two for resting and recreation. But there’s only so much slowdown a company can survive. Hot tub dealers in several cold-weather states offer these 10 tips for keeping winter sales hot:

Create a winter wonderland.
Even in the coldest months, people want to spend more time outside, says Monte Lanka, manager of the California Spa and Fitness Store in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada: “We don’t want to have them thinking of us only during summer, especially since people get the most out of a hot tub during winter.”

Lanka says his store runs print ads showing people outdoors enjoying a hot tub. He also creates “winter scenes” within the store: a hot tub displayed with skis and fake snow. “We dress it up and give it a nice feel,” Lanka says.

At New England Spas and Sunrooms in suburban Boston, would-be buyers are invited to take a test-dip in the spa that sits on the store’s deck. Co-owner Peter Lavenson says that seeing customers climbing into the spa on a winter day is a powerful lure for people traveling the road outside the store.

“Hot tubs in winter are a lot of fun,” says Joe Stone, incoming president of the National Spa & Pool Institute’s Hot Tub Council. “There are a lot of benefits to a hot tub: the ability to relax, the ability to retreat into your own paradise, the ability to renew one’s self. Ask anyone to tell you about the last time they went to a hotel and had a great time, and the story almost always involves a hot tub. Well, you can do the same thing at home. You can go right into your backyard and create a wonderful environment.”

Offer incentives.
By offering specials on stock models, Sensational Spas in Stevensville, Mich., saw its business jump 20 percent in 1999. Business manager Jackie VanHorn says the special offer might be anything from “throwing in some add-on like a cover lifter” to giving a price discount. (Price breaks typically run between $250 and $500.) Sensational Spas restricts these special offers to “whatever happens to be on the floor,” says VanHorn. But considering that the store generally displays 30 to 50 spas, that’s a sizable selection.

Be special... really special.
November had always been the worst month at Olympic Hot Tub Co. in Seattle. Now November is the home of the three-store company’s only true sale of the year. While the company runs periodic specials throughout the year, says co-owner Alice Cunningham, “we can advertise truthfully that this is the lowest price of the year.”

Close-out sales are a natural for wintertime because stores are preparing for the soon-to-arrive new year’s models. Anchor Aquatech in Yorktown, Va., traditionally holds an inventory close-out sale in late December or January, says salesman Brad Kelly. “Customers can save quite a bit. That’s always a big sale for us,” he notes.

Advertise.
“We try to do a little more advertising in winter,” says VanHorn of Sensational Spas. “We stress that we’re open year ’round, seven days a week, and that we do deliver in winter.”

VanHorn says a new radio campaign “is doing very well for us so far.” Although a heavy newspaper advertiser in the past, the local adult contemporary radio station “gave me an offer I couldn’t turn down.” She says the station is geared to office environments and to women. VanHorn adds that a previous campaign on a station that targeted men in their 30s and 40s brought “zero response.”

New England Spas and Sunrooms has been encouraging hot tub purchases this year by stressing two themes in its late fall/early winter marketing: “Get out of the jungle and into a hot tub” and “vacation at home,” says co-owner Lavenson. The company has pushed the messages in all media, including direct mail, in conjunction with announcing its new store.

Bone up.
“We use winter for the salespeople and me to get our act together,” says Brandon Eytcheson, spa sales and advertising design manager at Performance Pool and Spa in Woodbury, Minn. “We make a trip down to the Saratoga plant. It can be very important to have that firsthand knowledge of how things are done.

“We’ll also have our Saratoga guy come down and go over pitches with us,” he adds. “And we’ll do sales pitches to each other here in the showroom.”

With real customers, says Eytcheson, “we try to work more together, to team up a bit more. We’ll play boss and subordinate. We’ll let the more experienced guy come out and reinforce some of the points that the first salesperson made. Winter gives us the time to try a few tactics.”

Joe Stone of the Hot Tub Council encourages such work. “If salespeople haven’t done their homework, then they’re going to have a struggle. They can blame it on the price or the economy, but the issue usually comes down to establishing the value and benefit of owning a hot tub. We have to raise the proficiency of salespeople to close a sale, to take care of a customer. Because once a customer really understands the visuals, it’s a short line to draw to a sale.”

Remember accessories.
Hot tubs have a different kind of customer, too, says Anchor Aquatech’s Kelly. “People who have a hot tub, their friends come in to purchase things for them.” Scents and small kits of chemicals are favorite gift purchases, he says, along with gift certificates. Such customers, says Kelly, “open up our customer base” for future mailings.

Olympic Hot Tub Co. stocks what Cunningham says “has to be the largest selection of hot tub toys around.” Among the most popular toys are the “100 percent lifelike” plastic fish, which also squirt, and umbrella hats for those rainy days and nights in the spa.

Try a new location.
“When you’re a little guy,” Rosemary Locigno says, “you try to get the most impact for the dollar.” Locigno is retail sales manager of Clearwater Pools and Hot Tubs, a 10-year-old store that is hidden — literally — in suburban Rochester, N.Y. “We’re behind a couple of other buildings,” Locigno says. “We don’t have street exposure.”

To build its name recognition, Clearwater is going where the customers are during the holiday season. They’ve taken a two-month lease in Marketplace Mall.
Locigno calls the mall store an “experiment” whose goal isn’t necessarily to make a ton of sales during the two months. The store’s most successful marketing is through direct-mail pieces sent to their in-house database. “So we’re looking to get a larger database. And more exposure. We’re not just worried about sales in the next two months. When we do home shows, we’re still getting business from it months later.”

The mall store display includes 17 spas, plus related products such as domes and gazebos. “The response has been excellent,” Locigno says, “both in terms of people who have never heard of us and people who didn’t know much about spas.”

Locigno says the Clearwater did close two sales in its first week at the mall, “but neither sale was because of the mall store; those spas would have sold anyway.” What she does credit to the new exposure is 23 “good leads” — customers whom she believes are truly potential buyers. “These people weren’t in the market for a spa until they saw us in the mall.”

Cement relationships.
The slower showroom pace of winter makes it a superb time to work on the store’s relationships. At Performance Pool and Spa, the sales staff digs into the customer list to mine new business. “It’s a good time to contact the people we’ve built inground pools for and ask them if they have any spa needs,” says Eytcheson, a spa sales and advertising design manager.

One of the three newsletters published by Olympic Hot Tub Co. each year hits the mail in November, says Cunningham. The winter publication not only reinforces the company’s referral rewards, but also heavily touts the trade-in program for people looking to update or upgrade their spas.

At Mountain Hot Tub in Bozeman, Mont., “We really pound on building relationships with architects, builders and interior decorators,” says salesroom manager Mario Maichel.

Mountain Hot Tub representatives make regular visits to builders’ offices to touch base and deliver a “builder book” to be used as a reference when speaking to clients and drawing up plans. The book includes brochures, specification sheets and pre-delivery information, as well as company business cards. “We do everything we can to make the builder’s job easier and not harder,” says Maichel.
The company also offers special pricing for people in the construction industry. That markdown varies according to the model, says Maichel, “but it’s a good price.”

Stock up.
Because winter is hot tub season, it makes sense to have more spas to show. Anchor Aquatech isn’t a large store, says Kelly, and it usually displays only two spas during summer. But during winter, they make room for one or two more display spas. One of the winter spas is the first thing customers see coming in the door. This is also the hot tub that gets dressed up during the holiday season.

Be ready to deliver.
“People procrastinate the decision to buy a hot tub,” observes Lavenson. “But once they make that decision, they want it now.” Unfortunately, if the spa has to be ordered, it can be difficult to install the spa quickly. “So we actually beef up our stock in winter,” he says. “We have as many as 50 percent more in stock that we usually do in order to satisfy that demand.”

Mountain Hot Tub goes out of its way to assure customers that the store will get their hot tubs up and running as quickly as possible, even if the buyer doesn’t have a deck or patio already in place. “We tell them that our delivery guys will have shovels to clear the snow from their backyard and will put down railroad ties or whatever to create a temporary pad,” Maichel says. “That allows them to get the hot tub they want even if they don’t have a spot for it until April or May.” (The store also will move the hot tub into a permanent space during the first six months at no charge.)

After all, “winter is the best time to have a hot tub,” adds Maichel. “And we tell them that we’ll make it happen.”