Retail sales suck, at least for people like me.
Those records (from this email last week) were:
The first 3 bullet-points above all happened within that one sale that I made (the pity sale was different, will explain later).
My one real sale was a bundle – TV, VCR and stand… but the gentleman wanted a second stand for a TV and VCR he already had at home. He didn’t want any of the stands we sold separately. He wanted that stand.
I couldn’t separate the bundle because they were literally bundled together in the box.
The gentleman was insistent, he needed that exact stand. The one we didn’t have an individual code or price for.
If you haven’t sensed this yet, this guy was a pain in the ass – he came back 3 times to make this sale happen, and he knew he had a sucker of a sales person (me) to get what he wanted.
My answer should have been no. Instead, I convinced the warehouse guy to help me (help ME! I didn’t want the stupid thing!). We yanked a stand out of the box, and figured out a price to charge this guy based on the cost of the item.
The sales desks around the store were such that the customer could just stand next to you and see the screen – he could see the cost price we’d assigned to the stand, as well as what we decided to charge him (cost plus some arbitrary percentage). He insisted on the cost price, and being a complete the pushover I still am, I couldn’t argue my way out of it. I actually just wanted this guy to take his stand and f**k off, so I agreed to cost price.
But he still wasn’t happy.
He needed (needed!) blank tapes so he could record all of the lame shows shitbags like him watch when they’re sitting at home with their feet up on the unitemised TV stand they just bought.
So I said “Sure, I’ll throw them in for free”.
Finally he was happy.
At the counter, the amazing Kim at the desk helped me put this complete circus of a sale through in all it’s unbundled glory – I handed her the blank tapes and whispered I’ll just pay for these myself (👈 embarrassing upsell …not actually an upsell).
She took them from me, clicked a few keys and said “don’t worry, it’s all sorted”.
He was finally out of my life, and I asked Kim what she did to put the tapes through… she spun the screen around and showed me the “G” code she’d assigned to it. The sale looked something like this:
She casually told me that G stood for Gift, so I said “Oh cool, thanks!” and we went on with our day.
When I was called into my bosses office about the whole thing, he was actually really nice about it… but he pointed to the “G” code and said “There’s only one person who can give gifts… that’s Mr. Lee” … as in Bing Lee – the dude who’s name is on all of the 40-odd stores 🤦♂️
Unbreakable rule broken.
In 2 months, I set some impressive records.
The high value pity sale is also impressively sad but I’ll do that one another day.
On a completely unrelated note, I’m running a sales workshop on September 18th!
You’ll learn things like:
This is not rehashed theory from sales books – it’s the stuff I use in my own business, completely tailored to people like us who run a Company-Of-One, have limited resources, and generally would prefer not to have to do sales (but understand we have to).
It’ll be a small group, 6 people max, with lots of space to ask questions and get specific advice for your situation.
I promised the full details for this last Friday but I’ve since moved the date to later in September (now the 18th) so all of the details will land this week.
Click here to indicate your interest (clicking is not a commitment to buy) and let me know one thing you’d like to see specifically for your situation in a workshop like this.
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