This may seem very obvious to you but, a sales person's job is to sell. Let me explain.
Baby Lock Tech is Tacony Corporation's largest annual dealer event. Several hundred of the best sewing machine retailers from all across the country attend to see new items, meet their fellow dealers, and to attend presentations to learn the latest sewing techniques and ways to improve their businesses. This year's event took place this week here in St. Louis.
While we do our very best to provide our business partners with the latest and best information, we learn a lot from them, too. Over the next few days, I'm going to share some of the things that I learned from our dealers. Please keep this in mind. With some exceptions, retailing is retailing. What works for a sewing machine retailer will work just as well for any other merchant. One of the values of working with a diversified company like Tacony Corporation is that we can be a conduit to pass valuable information from one of our industries to another.
Mike Piper is a salesman. He owns Best Sewing in Seattle, a very successful business. Mike was a presenter at Baby Lock Tech on the subject of special events. We'll be looking at some of the points he made in a future post, but for today, I wanted to focus on one thing that Mike said that applies to all sales, whether they're at an off-site event, or in the store.
Mike calls himself a shark because he trolls the aisle in front of his trade show booth, looking for customers. He's very proactive when it comes to selling, and he makes no apology for it. He calls it "SHED", or selling hard every day.
To paraphrase (because I don't take very good notes), it costs a lot of money to operate a selling space, whether it's a show booth or a retail store. The only reason to spend that money is to sell stuff. Period. If you don't try to sell something to every person you talk to, you're wasting your money, and who wants to do that?
There are some people who will be offended by such a blatant effort to exchange their money for your merchandise, but you can't lose something you didn't have in the first place. If they're offended by your asking for a sale, then you won't make a sale. If you don't try to sell them something, you won't make a sale. What's the difference? The difference is that if you ask them to buy, they just might do it.
Remember, there's more to making a sale than just asking for the order. But, if you do your job the right way, ask the right questions, and offer the customer a solution to their problem, then you've earned the right to ask them to buy.
A shark has to keep moving to stay alive. So does a sales person.
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