Cover Story : The New Art of Selling

Masters of sales take a different approach to wary customers in a shaken economy

November 6, 2008 By Audrey Gray

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In an autumn when bad economic news has been trumped only by the next day’s worse economic news, that barrier has become noticeably more impenetrable. Consumers are increasingly cautious about parting with their cash or acquiring more debt, especially for big-ticket items. Out at Bjorn’s, those spending jitters were on full display in early October, said James Pool, Bjorn’s top salesperson for two years running.

“I had a $7,500 flat-panel sale on a Sunday that was supposed to go out on Wednesday,” said Pool. “Come the day of the delivery, I get a call from the son and they cancelled the delivery. He said his mother had watched CNN and saw someone say you should hold off on big purchases. I talked with him about other options, but he said she was sure. I expect there’ll be more of that.”

It’s too early to predict how volatile stocks and dire punditry might affect consumers’ CE purchases during the 2008 holiday season, but salespeople like Pool, as well as the people who are training the current CE sales force, are remarkably optimistic ... with one condition. They say that consumers will buy electronics if and only if they are approached with respect and genuine concern, with a sympathetic soft touch that is often in direct contrast to past sales approaches and training programs.
As Stan-the-Man Brooks puts it, “People still want to buy, but nobody wants to be sold.”

FORGET EVERYTHING YOU LEARNED
Steve Bryant, president of The Bryant Group, has trained tens of thousands of salespeople, most of them members of the Nationwide Marketing Group, over the years in both seminars and online modules he produces out of his PrimeMedia facility in Atlanta. Tim Ryan, principal of Consumer Electronics University, spent over 20 years training salespeople for the Ultimate Electronics chain before starting his own training and consulting firm based in Englewood, Calif. He’s been hired by The Pro Group, among others, to update the way salespeople approach and engage shoppers. Both men say salesmanship has become a completely different ballgame over the last 18 months.

“The process that had been in place for something like 30 years was ‘Greet, qualify, present, demonstrate, overcome objections, close and follow up,’” Ryan said. “But the steps have changed. The new sales process must deal with the needs a customer has, the lifestyle and preferences of the customer. Forget, ‘Stack ‘em high and let ‘em fly, get ‘em out the door!’ Our sales process in 2008 has to make sure that customer loyalty is the number-one goal.”

The sales process today is based on trust, Bryant said: “The way you earn a customer’s trust is to act like a human being, and you absolutely can’t fake it. If you don’t like people and have their interests at heart, get out of sales, go do something else.”

The reasons these men insist that the hard sell is entirely passé are numerous: The rise of the Internet-educated consumer (people think they know more than sales clerks, and sometimes they do), product commoditization (consumers expect they can get it cheaper somewhere else), and exasperation as the result of hundreds of bad sales experiences (they’re suspicious of anything that even remotely looks, walks or talks like that lampooned stereotype, the used car salesman).

Those current attitudes, along with everything associated with the economic meltdown, make consumers especially wary, leaving no patience for a slick-sounding pitch. The answer is to simply stop giving it to them.
“When a patient walks into a doctor, you don’t hear a doctor say, ‘Hey, wait, before you start telling me symptoms, I want you to know we have a sale on Valium this week’,” Ryan said. “They’re not trying to qualify you for an appendectomy just because there’s a special this week.”

In the same way as doctors, salespeople have to earn a person’s trust and then carefully ask a lot of questions and listen intently before making any suggestions about solutions. If you find out what problems a customer wants solved, you can make a spot-on diagnosis about the most effective products for particular needs and, thus, gain the customer’s trust.

But getting a customer to talk to you can be a trick in itself. Bryant’s training programs devote three hours just on how to say “Hello” to today’s consumers. “I can tell you, the words ‘May I help you?’ or ‘What can we do for you?’ destroy any chance you have of making the customer look at your company as a different place to shop,” Bryant said.

So, what’s an eager, commission-inspired modern salesperson to do when a new customer walks in?

“Look like someone who works for a living—vacuum or straighten something,” said Bryant. “The more you look like a stock person and less like a salesperson, the more approachable you’ll be.”

On the salesfloor at Bjorn’s in San Antonio, Tim Ryan will often pick up a remote control and make adjustments to a TV or an audio system. “I’ll even walk around with a piece of paper and look like I’ve got to write something down,” he said.

Once a customer is given space, they already feel more comfortable. When the introduction between the salesperson and the customer is made, it’s more like the interaction that would happen in a bar or at a backyard barbeque. A simple hello and a gentle, ice-breaking conversation about anything else but selling, from the weather to what’s on the TV, will do. From there, it’s all relational. As in all good relationships, the best practice is to be a genuine, interested listener.

FROM DIAGNOSIS TO HOUSE CALLS
For the last three years, CEA’s team of analysts have been urging electronics salespeople, based on consumer surveys, to “do the demo.” Steve Koenig, CEA’s director of industry analysis, and a champion of this hand-on approach, said the demo had better be surgically specific.

“Based on consumer research, we know that the most effective salespeople listen, know what they’re talking about, and demo,” Koenig said. “The demo has never been more important. It must be a tailored solution, though. Customers don’t want to be rail-roaded into anything today. A salesperson who asks questions like, ‘What did you like most and least about your digital camera?’ and then really listens to the answer can gain their trust.”

Ryan takes that demo advice even farther, urging salespeople to forego the popular “WOW-experience” types of demos (the $100,000 home theater systems or $3,500 pro D-SLR bodies) altogether and only show customers a product that specifically answers their needs.

“Because people are price-conscious, you can’t afford to do a demo that doesn’t solve problems,” Ryan said. “You have to give them justification for the investment.”

Salesman Andy Waldher, a 35-year-old who has worked 17 years at Deranleau’s, an appliance and specialty electronics dealer in Lewiston, Idaho, has learned to reign in his own fascination with all the bells and whistles of a new product and show people exactly what they say they want.

“I will never manipulate someone into something they don’t want; it just isn’t good business behavior,” said Waldher. “If you want the repeat business and the referral, you must have their best interests at heart.”

Waldher stumbled on another essential key to 2008 sales success a while ago, when his elderly customers began asking him again and again how they could get the clock on their VCRs to stop blinking.

“I started making house calls after work, not charging anything, just dropping by and programming their VCRs for them. I can’t even tell you how many I did, it’s a scary number. But that was the start of the transition for me,” he said.

Those after-hours visits to garnered Waldher a reputation in Idaho as being a trusted advisor. He’s been a top salesperson at Deranleau’s ever since and says he hardly has time to keep up with his referral business. (Waldher’s sales figures this year have been up, even during the last few months.)

Bjorn’s James Pool has used the same strategy to great effect. “I’d say house visits are the number-one key to my success right now,” Pool said. “When you’re invited to the home, the customer is on their own turf, so they’re more relaxed. I get in there, look and listen. My eyes are scanning the room, but I’m letting the homeowner say what they need to say.”

Pool recently visited the home of a mother who was talking about her son’s gaming habits. The kid had three different gaming systems in his bedroom. As Pool listened, he heard the mother’s concerns about safety and aesthetics. By the end of his visit, he’d suggested a multi-product solution that would get all the wires up off the floor. But even more importantly, he’d become that mother’s trusted advisor.

 “Look at the custom world right now,” Ryan said. “We go into customers’ homes, build a relationship with them, listen to what they have to say and really find out about their lifestyle. Why aren’t we taking that model and applying to the floor? The customer is king today; the product is no longer king.”

It’s an approach Stan Brooks puts into practice every day on the floor at Ken Crane’s. Though he still has that boy-next-door charm and can talk to anybody, Brooks said the only way to make it in the business right now is to cut the antics and become incredibly useful to every customer he encounters.

“In this economy, people aren’t going to be throwing their money at you,” he said. “You have to get in their heads and find out what’s best for them.”

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