ABOUT THE REPORT
Every device brand in this industry has a view on how salon owners buy, and almost none of those views have been tested against what owners say when you ask them, so we asked the owners themselves. Salon and clinic owners across Australia and New Zealand walked us through the most recent treatment device they brought into their business, from the first moment they thought it was worth looking into through to how the machine is performing today.
Because every owner answered about one real purchase rather than what they might do in theory, the findings describe how devices are actually bought, and they are often not how suppliers assume. Most owners decide alone and move quickly, almost half negotiate nothing at all, and the costs that matter most once the warranty ends are the ones they are least likely to be told about.
What Salon Owners Want: Devices Edition is written for device brands, distributors and their sales and education teams, and for anyone who needs to understand how an owner decides before walking into the room.
75.0%
of owners said nobody else had a real say in the final decision or could have stopped it
38.6%
seriously considered only the device they bought
13.6%
were told upfront what servicing costs once the warranty ends
CONTENTS
The report follows a device purchase from start to finish across eight chapters. It begins with what sets a purchase in motion and what owners have settled before they ever speak to a supplier, then moves through how they find and compare machines, what suppliers tell them and what they leave out, and how the deal is done. The later chapters look at what happens after the sale, including how quickly a device earns its place and why some owners would buy from the same supplier again while others never will, before turning to who else has a say in the decision and what owners plan to buy next.
It closes with six practical implications for device suppliers and a section of owners' own words, quoted exactly as they wrote them with every supplier name redacted.
MAKING THE MOST FROM DATA INSIGHTS
The brands and distributors who get the most from research like this are the ones who take it into the rooms where decisions about selling are made, and these are the places we would start.
Revisit your sales process
Hold your current process up against what owners told us, and look at when an owner first hears the full cost of ownership.
Rethink your outreach approach
Give owners something clear to share with a peer or take home, since that is how they research and who they listen to.
Strengthen your post-purchase onboarding SOP
Loyalty is decided after the sale, so use the after-sale findings to review everything from the first training session to the regular check-in.
National sales meetings
Let your field team test their own approach against what owners said.
Board presentations
Use the numbers to make the case for investing in after-sale training and support.
Internal WIP meetings
Anchor a focused conversation about one part of your sales process on a single chart.
Distributor education conferences
Help your partners sell the way owners actually want to buy.
THREE WAYS TO READ IT
Start with the free excerpt, which includes three of the report's headline findings and one chapter in full, so you can see how the research is built before you decide whether you need the rest. When you are ready for the full edition, you can buy it on its own for $300, or subscribe to Inside Industry Intelligence for $1,000 a year and receive it along with every other report we publish, which makes the subscription the better buy if you read more than one of our reports a year.
WHO WE ARE
Inside Industry is a B2B research and consulting business led by Tamara Reid, built on close to twenty years in the professional hair, beauty and aesthetics industry. We speak the language of the salons and clinics your brand sells to, and our research gives you their answers in their own words.
Stop guessing from the outside, and let us accelerate your brand, inside industry.
