Thanks for reading my blog and for posting such an excellent comment! The thing with some sales “clerks” is that they are not real sales people. Incentives and bonus money is often what motivates a sales person to closing a deal and if they are not seeing dollar signs when customers walk in the door then they are hurting your business. When I developed my marketing coaching service I saw that was one of the biggest struggles that marketing and advertising had with closing sales…the staff or owner was not able to close a sale. I could launch an effective ad campaign and get the people in the door of a furniture store or car dealership, but without a seasoned sales staff that was hungry to move the inventory we were all sunk. When I work with a client I look at the entire process and make sure that we are poised for the best results. In the store you worked at, unless your prices were outrageously high compared to your competitors, I would have quickly recognized that you needed to either add a great incentive to the employees who sold or that you needed the incentive and me [or another sales trainer] to train them on the art of selling. And, there will always be people who were just not cut out for sales. This means that hiring sales staff requires more than just adding bodies behind the register. If you want your business to thrive you must go for excellence on every level and reward the people who work for you that are getting it done. Mark, it sounds like that problem is in the past, but if you ever find a situation like that again please feel free to connect with me. All my best to YOUR success! ~ Charlene

Coming from the retail sales channel, your post actually reminded me of why we DID NOT post prices in our stores. The word… “Clerk”

We were in the consumer PC sales market in a destination store – when people walked into our stores, we only sold one thing, therefore they were ALL interested buyers. There was no way someone would stumble in, without intent of buying.

That aside… we found that when we put prices on the displays, our sales staff no longer engaged the customers into conversation! Without prices, the doors were wide open for mutually beneficial interation between the sales staff and customers, with an FFBQ sales process, needs assessments etc. Put a price tag on it… and the entire sales process came to a screeching halt!

Customers became “Shoppers” and our highly trained sales staff, who understood needs assessments, and how to ask all the right questions, became “Clerks” standing behind registers.

Our net profit dropped like 14-15 percentage points, since the interaction was gone.

Unfortunately, I think the days of one-to-one needs assessments are gone with the web!

Good post – it just brought back my own experiences.

Mark