Art of the Sale: How and when to use a counter to make a sale
Rosa said:
...for the entire month of April, I’ll be looking for posts that bloggers have written about selling, making the sale, and business sales in general…
Talking Story with Say Leadership Coaching: An April meme preview.
There are two things that immediately sprang to my mind:
1. When to stop talking (previous article)
2. How and when to use a counter to make a sale (this article)
In 1995 I was working as a salesman in a computer retail outlet. The store owner there taught me a valuable lesson, about shop counters.
It was the prevailing attitude around where I was to get out from behind the shop counter, move out into the floor space, be with the customer. Shake hands, walk them to the various displays.
It was an effort to become personal with the customer.
Now, the store owner taught me that there is nothing wrong with being personal. But he did teach me that the customer owns the shop floor, the salesperson owns the space behind the counter.
If a customer is feeling pressured, they will step back from the counter. As a salesperson, it was our responsibility to pickup on that and change our tactics. The lesson, don’t invade the customers space.
Customers who buy when they feel pressured aren’t good word of mouth advertisers.
Now heres a bonus tip:
If we had reached the end of what we could do, in terms of service or price, then we, the salespeople, would step back from the counter, even return to our desk and sit down. This very clearly indicated to the customer, that we were not able to negotiate any further.
I found this very, very hard to do. To literally walk away from a sale was counter to everything I had been taught thus far.
But the bottom line is this: it’s not profitable (money wise or relationship wise) to consistently discount (price or service). By using the counter, we, by our body lanuage told the customer that this sale was not worth dropping our prices further.
Most customers actually respected that. They would then walk around the shop floor and hum and har and mumble, talk amongst themselves. They would make a decision and either walk out, or walk back to the counter and get our attention, and complete the sale.
Tagged with: Art+of+the+Sale.
