IN THE TRENCHES: Take a selling lesson from our lemonade stands
IN THE TRENCHES: Take a selling lesson from our lemonade stands
Did you ever have a lemonade stand when you were a kid? Most of us had one, and it was a lot of fun selling that lemonade, especially earning the money.
This past summer I saw something that sent me back to my childhood days. It was my neighbor's little girl, Micaela, from across the street sitting at a lemonade stand in front of her house. Her mother was overseeing her as she sold paper cups of lemonade. Being a hot summer day and because I was quite impressed with her sales ambition, I just had to buy a cup.
I remember those days when I had a lemonade stand. My family lived in the city and I set up a couple of boxes on the sidewalk of a busy street corner right smack in front of a bus stop. Nobody told me what to do or how to do it. I just yelled out, "ice-cold lemonade" and people came running over and bought cup after cup. I sold so much lemonade that it helped pay for my baseball gloves, model airplanes and even bicycles.
As young school kids, we didn't realize that we were actually operating a retail business. Just like little Micaela, we were salespeople selling product to make a profit.
Does selling lemonade on a street corner as children play some role later in our lives such as teaching us "selling skills?" Did it somehow personally influence me to enter into a supermarket industry retail career? This thought probably has some merit to it.
If I asked, "What do you do?" how would you answer the question?
Whenever I ask that question, most people often give their job title, not what they actually do. Replies are something like, "Oh, I'm the marketing vice president for the XYZ Company." Or they might say, "I'm a buyer for the XYZ supermarket." Very rarely is the response, "I'm in sales. I sell product to people."
As far as I'm concerned, everybody who works for a company is in sales. Even if a company is just a service organization, every employee should be selling that service.
My dentist is a good example of selling a service. He keeps suggesting that I come back every six months for another exam. And as usual, I return to buy his service again. That's called "persuasive selling."
Selling should be a lot of fun, especially in the produce business. It should be exciting and filled with enthusiasm every day. People should be encouraged to set up the biggest and best displays to sell large volumes of product. We should all be going above and beyond to sell as much as possible all the time. But somehow it appears we've lost a great deal of this "fun selling" enthusiasm.
There's a new way of selling today and it's not all that motivating. It's called "make the bottom line or else" selling. This new style is a very conservative format that simply states, "Go after sales, but control what you do in the process."
The new format concentrates heavily on three major factors: gross profit, labor and shrink. Thus, whenever a store employee feels the urge to get aggressive with sales displays, he or she is automatically reminded of the three factors that are management's priority. It is at this point that the employees let go of the rope in fear of stepping over the line. They are uncomfortable in going all out with aggressive merchandising, only to have superiors evaluate and criticize their gross profit and shrink afterward. It becomes too much of a stressful risk factor for them. For this reason, store employees tend to back off aggressive selling and take the safer, more conservative road instead.
Do you know what dictates the produce business today? It's reams of paper with columns and rows showing endless details about product items. In most cases, the details are a big help to management in dealing with important business strategy decisions.
On the other hand, using the material to overcontrol an operation could backfire. Unfortunately, many of the contributing components to conservative selling today are the way the reports are being used.
Don't misunderstand me. I'm a very firm believer in category statistics and the vital information they furnish. We can't blame the statistical reports for causing us to shy away from aggressive selling. But management is so tied up with category reports that it has lost most of the true art of selling. And to me, the true art of selling is with all-out massive and aggressive "muscle displays" that generate not only high-volume dollars but also excitement for the consumers.
If you want to control sales, cut back to one-layer conservative displays. Some operators are doing this right now and struggling for business. It may give you the gross profit, shrink and labor percentage numbers you're looking to achieve. But if you really want to move some heavy volume and generate a lot of gross profit doing it, then knock the consumers' socks off with aggressive displays.
Too often, utilizing the "statistic-control management" habit of selling simply has companies running around curves, doing zigzags and crashing into walls. Perhaps we just need to go back to setting up lemonade stands all over again in order to learn the true meaning of selling.
(Ron Pelger is the owner of RONPROCON, a consulting firm for the produce industry. He can be reached by phone at 775/853-7056, by e-mail at [email protected], or check his web site at www.power-produce.com.)
This past summer I saw something that sent me back to my childhood days. It was my neighbor's little girl, Micaela, from across the street sitting at a lemonade stand in front of her house. Her mother was overseeing her as she sold paper cups of lemonade. Being a hot summer day and because I was quite impressed with her sales ambition, I just had to buy a cup.
I remember those days when I had a lemonade stand. My family lived in the city and I set up a couple of boxes on the sidewalk of a busy street corner right smack in front of a bus stop. Nobody told me what to do or how to do it. I just yelled out, "ice-cold lemonade" and people came running over and bought cup after cup. I sold so much lemonade that it helped pay for my baseball gloves, model airplanes and even bicycles.
As young school kids, we didn't realize that we were actually operating a retail business. Just like little Micaela, we were salespeople selling product to make a profit.
Does selling lemonade on a street corner as children play some role later in our lives such as teaching us "selling skills?" Did it somehow personally influence me to enter into a supermarket industry retail career? This thought probably has some merit to it.
If I asked, "What do you do?" how would you answer the question?
Whenever I ask that question, most people often give their job title, not what they actually do. Replies are something like, "Oh, I'm the marketing vice president for the XYZ Company." Or they might say, "I'm a buyer for the XYZ supermarket." Very rarely is the response, "I'm in sales. I sell product to people."
As far as I'm concerned, everybody who works for a company is in sales. Even if a company is just a service organization, every employee should be selling that service.
My dentist is a good example of selling a service. He keeps suggesting that I come back every six months for another exam. And as usual, I return to buy his service again. That's called "persuasive selling."
Selling should be a lot of fun, especially in the produce business. It should be exciting and filled with enthusiasm every day. People should be encouraged to set up the biggest and best displays to sell large volumes of product. We should all be going above and beyond to sell as much as possible all the time. But somehow it appears we've lost a great deal of this "fun selling" enthusiasm.
There's a new way of selling today and it's not all that motivating. It's called "make the bottom line or else" selling. This new style is a very conservative format that simply states, "Go after sales, but control what you do in the process."
The new format concentrates heavily on three major factors: gross profit, labor and shrink. Thus, whenever a store employee feels the urge to get aggressive with sales displays, he or she is automatically reminded of the three factors that are management's priority. It is at this point that the employees let go of the rope in fear of stepping over the line. They are uncomfortable in going all out with aggressive merchandising, only to have superiors evaluate and criticize their gross profit and shrink afterward. It becomes too much of a stressful risk factor for them. For this reason, store employees tend to back off aggressive selling and take the safer, more conservative road instead.
Do you know what dictates the produce business today? It's reams of paper with columns and rows showing endless details about product items. In most cases, the details are a big help to management in dealing with important business strategy decisions.
On the other hand, using the material to overcontrol an operation could backfire. Unfortunately, many of the contributing components to conservative selling today are the way the reports are being used.
Don't misunderstand me. I'm a very firm believer in category statistics and the vital information they furnish. We can't blame the statistical reports for causing us to shy away from aggressive selling. But management is so tied up with category reports that it has lost most of the true art of selling. And to me, the true art of selling is with all-out massive and aggressive "muscle displays" that generate not only high-volume dollars but also excitement for the consumers.
If you want to control sales, cut back to one-layer conservative displays. Some operators are doing this right now and struggling for business. It may give you the gross profit, shrink and labor percentage numbers you're looking to achieve. But if you really want to move some heavy volume and generate a lot of gross profit doing it, then knock the consumers' socks off with aggressive displays.
Too often, utilizing the "statistic-control management" habit of selling simply has companies running around curves, doing zigzags and crashing into walls. Perhaps we just need to go back to setting up lemonade stands all over again in order to learn the true meaning of selling.
(Ron Pelger is the owner of RONPROCON, a consulting firm for the produce industry. He can be reached by phone at 775/853-7056, by e-mail at [email protected], or check his web site at www.power-produce.com.)
