It's sales for beginners.  You must listen to your customer.  Internal or external.

It's so 101 that you could easily blow through this post and tune into the next thing.  Stayed tuned until point three and you'll have something new to try today.

As a salesperson I stood around or sat with other salespeople and shot the breeze while we waited for the next customer.  At any point any one of us might break away and wait on a customer.  If the GM strolled nearby…

We all have a list of questions designed to help salespeople discover customers wants and needs.  The trouble comes when a salesperson hones in on the answers to the questions and runs through their list like an interrogation.

The customer can be put off by this approach.  It can leave a bad taste.  The unfortunate impression is that the salesperson doesn't really care, is just trying to sell them a car as fast as possible, and it comes off as pushy.

I don't…

The Ride

It was the big hills that scared me.  That and the killer outfits some of them were wearing. Not to mention the bikes that weighed about as much as my shoe.  I didn’t want to be the domino that caused the whole group to end up being scraped off the pavement into ambulances.

It was late spring last year. I was at the Village Bike shop, getting my gear out of the car and getting myself into possible pain and humiliation on my first group ride billed as “Ride with the…

Rolling!  Lights, camera, terror.

My first automotive sales manager videoed me doing vehicle presentations and it took me from a knock kneed novice to a top presenter in record time.  For the first time I knew what I looked like when I was presenting.  It turned out that when I was nervous I tended to not only smooth my clothes but grab them and hold the edge of my shirt in a bunch.  Hilarious. Unless it’s you.

Here’s the key.  I only had to see myself do that once.  I fixed it…

My Grandfather Benedict was a United Methodist circuit preacher in Wyoming during the Great Depression He had 4 different churches. They were quite distant from each other so he would do 2 one week and two the second week. He always kept a suitcase in the car, and books and other what not because in Wyoming a storm can come out of nowhere. It could blow for days, and a traveler would simply knock on a door and be taken in until everything cleared up. It is not good to be caught out in a…