One Weird Lesson I Learned Selling Cars
Years ago I was a salesman for the Kia brand. I wasn’t very good at it either because I too much empathy. I didn’t feel comfortable lying or bending the truth to close a sale. I didn’t like pressuring people to sign. Asking for the sale was much harder than I ever believed. I foolishly thought if I presented well and worked hard to get the price a customer wanted, I would make the sale.
I had a coworker who was closer, or so I thought. The truth is, he was fed every lead that came in, and if you are in sales, leads that come to you are the easiest to sell. I learned life was unfair, some of us are fed, some of us are left to starve. Some are even crazy enough to build their own brand from scratch. But none of this is the weird lesson I learned. That lesson came when I entered a bakery to buy a donut.
In car sales, I was trained on a way to greet a customer. You would say your name, your hellos, and then you would ask them if they were here to look for a new car or a used one. I was trained to never ask “How can I help you?” or “Do you need any help?” because then people would reflexively reject you with “No thanks” or “Just looking.” They don’t even mean to do it, it’s pure reaction, and I often do it to this day and have to stop myself if I am really there to find a specific thing and need help.
The car sales greeting was designed to circumvent any reactive rejection. You had to always smile and nod, and for God’s sake, remember their name. You led them down into the sales funnel without them ever knowing you were doing it. Sometimes they would resist and you had ways to overcome these same tired old objections like “I don’t have time right now”, “I’m just looking”, “I need so-and-so to be here”, etc.
It was because I had a sales funnel drilled into me I noticed a complete lack of it everywhere else, starting with my local bakery. I had entered this bakery many times, but this was the first time I noticed the cashier standing grumpily in the corner. She didn’t greet me, there was no smile, no communication whatsoever other than her clear annoyance of having a job.
I poked around and examined the available goods in the display case. I didn’t know what half the things were, so I ended up choosing my usual. I’m not the kind of customer who is going to ask questions, and if I’m greeted with a stony indifference, I want to get out of there.
When I left it occurred to me the bakery owner, who was very friendly and helpful herself, didn’t train her employee how to greet and sell to customers. It probably never occurred to her to bother doing so. Employees either had a friendly disposition or they didn’t. It is natural, it is innate, a salesman is born not trained. That day I learned it was all a lie. If businesses want their employees to be good, they need to train them, even in the smallest of positions.
What if the bakery cashier had been trained on a sales greeting? What if, when I entered, she smiled at me and said hello. And then, what if she went on to ask about what I was looking for. To which I respond sheepishly, “I’m just browsing” because I don’t want to be bothered. She professionally ignores my plaintive bleating and explains to me the categories, what is day old, what is fresh, what is new, what are the most popular things. She adds commentary to my browsing (it’s a small bakery, not the kind like you find in a supermarket where you can wander around). She unwittingly sparks my interest in something new that I think my wife might like, something I would never have discovered on my own. I leave the store with my usual and with something else. A sale has been effortlessly made.
Almost every store I go into that doesn’t have a commissioned salesperson has no sales funnel greet and meet. Why not? Why don’t managers teach their associates to sell? The associate doesn’t even need to initiate, like say, a stocker or cashier, but there should definitely be training on how they should interact with every customer. The old Wal-Mart trained staff to smile and greet every customer that came near them. Right now I’m thinking of Chick-Fil-A and how they have a definite way they want their personnel to greet customers.
By selling cars a new layer of reality surfaced in my consciousness. I now saw the severe lack of sales training in every employee in retail. How many small businesses could increase revenue with nothing more than training their minimum wage staff a process. It is always the employer’s responsibility to ensure staff handle customers the way they want them to. The best customer service is not natural, it has to be learned, and it can definitely be trained.
When businesses neglect to create a simple meet and greet process for every employee on the floor, they are showing their sloppiness and laziness. They reveal that they don’t know what they’re doing, that they aren’t a top quality business.
And that’s what makes this lesson so weird, it is so obvious and yet, clearly rare. No business should assume their employee is fully ready, no matter how lowly the position. Everyone needs training, or at least to be drilled in the process. And the process has to be real and actionable. There should be scripts, there should be suggestions on body language, there should be an anticipation of objections, and there should be soft closes.
No business is too big or too small to do this one simple ask.