1. Greet each customer and introduce yourself by name. A sales person says, ‘Hi, I’m Chris. Welcome to our store.’ Compare this to, ‘May I help you?’, ‘Can I help you?’, ‘Do you have any questions I can help you with?’ Which greeting do you feel is more likely to lead to a relationship?

My mother drives 35 miles from our home on the Chesapeake Bay in Annapolis, Maryland to Baltimore, where she could do some serious shopping. I am too young to stay by myself, so she takes me with her. This is good and bad. I like the tall buildings in Baltimore and I like the turkey sandwich I order for lunch at the big store’s restaurant. But I dread the rest of the trip.

I sit in chairs by dressing rooms of every store on Charles Street, and I am obedient. I do not move and I do not to make any noise, difficult to do at five years old. I thus begin my career as a retail consultant, for it is during these hours that my young mind searches for diversion and finds it : I observe the sales process.

A salesperson approaches my mother and says, ‘May I help you?
My mother says, ‘No, I’m just looking.’
This is the play; this is the script; this is the punchline that I hear all day. As far as I know, this is what salespeople should say and this was how customers should respond. Why? Because I learn it from my mother as she did from hers. Customers have been customers much longer than typical retail salespeople have been salespeople. They have rehearsed their lines for years. They know what to say when a typical salesperson greets them with, ‘May I help you?’ The answer is, ‘No, I’m just looking.’

2. Invite call-ins to visit the store, and give them reasons why. Ask them to ask for you by name. A salesperson says, ‘Hi, thanks for calling Wireless Town, this is Chris.’ 95% of the time you will then hear one of four questions, ‘How late are you open?’, ‘Where are you located?’, ‘Do you have [some unit model] in stock?’, and ‘How much does it cost?’ To dispense with calls quickly, many salespeople offer short answers only:

-How late are you open? ‘Till 9:00.’
-Where are you located? ‘Next to the Sears entrance.’
-Do you have [xyz] in stock? ‘Let me check … Yes, we have it.’
-How much does it cost? ‘It’s $329.’

Instead our model salesperson says, ‘Yes, we have it in stock. We’re open tonight until 9:00 and I’d love to show you how you can actually use the new iSpurt-630 to send and receive email. Do you think you might visit our store tonight?’ If yes, add, ‘Again, I’m Chris, please ask for me when you arrive.’
How much more time does it take to respond to callers in this way? Is the extra effort worth it?
How often might you have to repeat this approach to ensure the predictability of your success? You will find this approach does not (repeat not) guarantee that (a) your call-in customers will actu¬ally show up, or (b) if your customers do show up they will ask for salespeople by their names. But it does increases the possibility and it’s this incremental improvement that creates new sales.

In short, do this 100 times and you may pick up 20 new sales. That’s the discipline of making the most of your traffic.

3. Never prejudge your customers. The prejudging mind thinks, ‘There’s one that will never pass credit.’ So, the salesperson gives this customer short schrift. The nonjudging mind thinks, ‘Even though this customer doesn’t look like he can afford it, I’m going to give it my best effort. Maybe I’ll be surprised.’ And many times you are.
father story My father sold Lincolns, the land yachts of the early 70s. It’s 1974 and the gas crisis hits. People wait in lines for two hours to buy two gallons of gas. The new car buyers want economy and sales of Lincolns fall. My father sees his traffic dwindle each day, and he sees the morale of his fellow salespeople fall as well.

Inside the showroom salespeople take turns, ‘ups’, to talk to customers. And since traffic is slow it can be a long time between ‘ups.’ It’s Monday morning. Cold buckets of rain conspire with the gas problem to make things worse. Finally, my father spies a lone woman in the lot, holding a newspaper over her head, looking at the interior of cars through their windows.  It’s not my father’s ‘up’, but the saleperson whose turn it is, looks at the rain, looks at the woman, looks at my father, and says, ‘You can have her.’ He accepts.  My father asks a few questions and learns that the lady’s husband has just passed away. As a consolation, she takes part of her cash from his life insurance and buy herself not one, but two new top-of-the-line Lincoln Continentals. It’s the biggest sale of my father’s life.
I asked my father how that made the other salesperson feel – the one who had prejudged his customer and relinquished his turn 
My father said, ‘He felt like taking the pipe,’ which was my father’s way of saying, ‘He felt like inhaling exhaust fumes from the tail pipe of a car and thereby ending his misery.’
Learn from this story. Treat each customer as a precious opportunity and make the most out of it. In the words of my father, ‘Never prejudge your customers. They can look like schlepps and have $10,000 in their pockets.’

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 ©2005 by The Edmond-Howard Network