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Stan Brooks, a former big-city radio DJ and one of the most funny and personable guys you’re to likely meet in a CE store, has never forgotten his interaction with two women who walked into his Circuit City store the first months he was on a sales floor.
“I walked up, you know, very casual and said, ‘Hi,’ and they completely ignored me,” he said. “I mean, completely. They didn’t even look my way, just stared straight ahead and walked right past.”
Brooks is the sort of salesperson who doesn’t take things personally. In fact, he considered the rejection a challenge and decided to follow them.
“They moved over to look at the TV wall and I walked up again and said, ‘Hi, I’m Stan, welcome to Circuit City, good to see you.’ And once again, nothing.”
Brooks stood back a while, a little puzzled this time that his considerable charms (at his current sales post at Ken Crane’s in Laguna Hills, Calif., Brooks is so popular that coworkers and customers call him “Stan the Man”) weren’t even garnering a sideways glance.
“After another minute or two, I saw these women start to use sign language with each other and I was like, ‘Ahhhhh, now I get it!’” laughed Brooks. “They pulled out a piece of paper and wrote out some questions, so I stayed with them and wrote out some answers and helped them find what they needed.”
What’s striking about Brooks’ story these days, is not that he was initially ignored, but that there was an identifiable reason why the two women weren’t responding to him. As Brooks and salespeople all over the nation will tell you, it’s much more typical today for customers to eye a door-greeter suspiciously, move quickly past and go off on their own. But they also offer plenty of tips to help close even the most difficult customers.
“You can walk up to a customer and say, ‘Hi,’ or even say something completely outrageous and their comeback will be, ‘I’m just looking,’” said Bjorn Dybdahl, owner of Bjorn’s in San Antonio. “It’s an automated response to a salesperson. How do you overcome this impression the person has that you’re a salesperson? ... It’s like customers have a force field around them, a barrier, and you’re trying to get through.”
