Duerden’s President Todd Hall, right, presents his company’s Employee of the Month award to AVBM’s KIOSQ display and the virtual MTEQ team of, left to right, Amber Roberts, John White, Eric Hunter and Kate Morris.
Awards AVB’s retail tech platform for winning the Labor Day weekend
YSN Staff
BrandSource member Todd Hall, president of Duerden’s Appliance & Mattress in Bountiful, Utah, knew he was facing a challenging Labor Day weekend.
“Last year was by far our best Labor Day weekend ever, so we had a high bar to clear,” he said. “With promotional discounts being so deep we’d need to write about 20% more tickets just to recognize the same revenue.”
Hall also knew that in order to take care of all his customers, he’d need to be correct on pricing, keep the sales people on the floor rather than at their desks and serve up multiple options fast.
For Duerden’s, a critical part of getting top close rates this past Labor Day was AVB Marketing’s (AVBM’s) MTEQ suite of integrated retail technology solutions. “First and foremost, our website and our store needed to be priced right at the first look,” Hall said. “The days of letting a customer walk and asking them to come back if they want us to match a better price need to be far behind us. If our website isn’t priced best, we’ll never get a chance in the store.”
Duerden’s set its pricing rules in LINQ — AVB Marketing’s proprietary backend system — to update with the competitive pricing at all the national retail chains and to ensure that each of the store’s digital price tags were programmed and working. This way, the sales floor and the website showed the most competitive prices each day of the holiday weekend.
On promotional holidays customers are very willing to invest in packages in order to get the best savings, Hall explained, although they often like to see the final total for several different packages. In the days of paper, and going back to the desk to write up a few quotes, this would take hours, he said. But by implementing HUB, AVBM’s customer relationship management tool, and giving each sales professional a table for the floor, Duerden’s was able to quickly put together packages with accurate pricing.
See: HUB Unleashed for All Members
“It takes minutes to put together the first package, and then even less time to do iterations,” Hall said. These can be printed out, displayed on the sales person’s tablet or emailed to the customer. “Generally, customers just pick one option and take out their credit cards,” he said.
Duerden’s used the handheld tablets on the floor to quickly rebuild the quotes in its Whirlwind point-of-sale system, take payments via wireless card readers and send customers a text receipt instantly.
Duerden’s also implemented AVBM’s interactive KIOSQ displays by placing two extra-large panels on the floor. The displays have all the filtering options offered through HUB or BrandSource’s Alta e-commerce website platform, and are large enough to make the images feel real to the customer. For example, if a customer loves a particular full-depth, flex drawer refrigerator but wonders if the brand offers it in a counter-depth model, the sales team can take the customer to the kiosk, show all of that manufacturer’s counter-depth options, and help them see all the images in full scale, Hall said.
“The critical element is that is this is all available on the floor without the sales professional having to step away to look things up, check competitor prices, or thumb through three-ring binders of vendor catalogs and price sheets,” he added.

All told, “We really rocked the use of HUB, digital price tags and the KIOSK over the Labor Day weekend,” Hall said. “The digital price tags with LINQ kept us up to date on pricing, the HUB got us quickly through what clients were interested in, and our extra-large KIOSQs extended our aisles to every available product.”
For those reasons and more, Duerden’s named MTEQ its “Employee of the Month” for September!
YSN publisher AVB BrandSource is the nation’s largest merchandising and marketing co-op for independent appliance, mattress, furniture and CE dealers.