Camera Store - The Hell of Retail

Hi, I'm Troy McClure. You Might Remember Me From...

Watched a sales-training video at work today. (Did some real work too, like cleaning, dealing with a furious customer, selling a Sony T1... Had to work for the sale too, show off all the features - DANG that's a nice camera. I could talk about it for an hour. Oh, wait, I just did).

The video was as bad as you'd imagine. Narrated by a news-team-like couple with segments in between, of actors pretending to work at a camera store. Or maybe they were real employees, given how I've seen better acting - and better camerawork - in the video projects my high-school class groups put together. The writing is brilliant, too: The salesman does a few small wrong things and the customers walk away furious, or don't buy anything. The salesman does a few small things right, and suddenly the customer is cheerful, talking about their lives, buying everything in sight, and thrilled at everything the salesman says. Oh brother...

The tape did include some nice points about how to sell. Most of these are things that most confident and respectful people should have no trouble with, like how to greet customers, how to present a product, how important it is to be informed, how you ought to treat your customers like people, with respect (i.e. not hover over them, but not ignore them). Duh.

A few of the points I disagreed with strongly enough to post them here.

One is that a salesman ought to start a conversation with a customer, using the customer's pictures, shopping bags, clothes, personal items, or other such things as clues to what to talk about. "Customers feel more willing to make buying decisions when they are in a relaxed environment, so make them feel at ease, be friendly, use their name if you know it, ask for it to begin with". Now, I don't know about you, but I HATE salespeople who ask personal questions, who try to pretend to be my best friend...

"Wow, so I see by your pictures/shirt/cap that you just spent a weekend at Eagle River. I used to go there a lot". "Um, yeah, it's nice, isn't it?".

Who, other than 60-year-old ladies who are oh-so-glad for any human interaction, would ever say anything like "Oh yes, it was WONDERFUL! The waterfalls, the pretty trails, the yellow-tailed spotted northwestern wild woodpeckers... did you manage to spot any while you were there?". I mean, other than for his trying to sell you stuff, the fact is that the salesman DOESN'T CARE, and trying to PRETEND that he cares only makes things more awkward. I try not to ramble too much when I talk (I get it out of my system by writing, as you can tell), even to friends and relatives, so if someone I barely know asks "So how was [event advertised on my shirt]?", all I CAN do is awkwardly say "Um, it was cool". What possible purpose could be served by me giving him details about something he doesn't care about?

(Unless he DOES actually care about it. I do have a couple very strong interests, which consume all of my free time outside of work - one of them is a very specific, small niche/field of photography, and others are more normal hobbies. If I see a customer shares these interests, I'll bring it up. The older customers do love it, and the younger ones are pleasantly surprised that they can talk to me like a real human being for a minute or two. But most people do NOT share these interests, and I'm sure as hell not going to pretend I like baseball just for the sake of trying to get a customer to feel more comfortable. I don't think I could pull it off, either).

The other point I strongly disagree with is: "It's bad to compare products". "Don't fall into the fatal Comparison Trap!!!". Show the customer one thing at a time, and just praise THAT. This makes it more likely they will buy something, and prevents the customer from thinking the store carries inferior products. That is BS. Different cameras have different features and cost different prices, and so offer different cost-benefit ratios. The super-nice ones are kinda overpriced, and the super-cheap ones take crappy pictures, with a full spectrum in between, and then you have your pocket cameras vs your big-lens ones... Just because I talk about two cameras at a time doesn't mean one is better, it just means I understand the customer can have priorities that I don't fully understand, or that THEY don't fully understand until they see a camera and fall in love with it. I do want them to get the camera that is right for THEM, because, you know, that's what I know how to do, because I know a lot about a lot of cameras, but I still don't think I can make a choice for someone else.

(I'll give you a perfect example: A customer came in one day and said they wanted a not-too-large digital camera, one that did not look too fancy (as it would be used in less-than-affluent neighbourhoods for some very necessary social work). She wanted the best camera she could get fitting that description for about $200-300. I thought about it for a second, and pulled out the Nikon 3200 ($200), the Fuji E510 ($300), and the Casio EX-Z30 ($250). The Casio is a very small 3-MegaPixel camera with a big screen, but not too sharp a lens. So it's tiny, pretty cheap, and very stylish. The Fuji is a 5MP camera, powered by AAs, and with ALL KINDS of amazing features, like manual control of everything, so that someone who likes photography can use it to take amazing pictures. But it doesn't look all fancy. The Nikon is also 3MP, no manual controls or other exciting features (well, lots of scene modes, and the always-desireable AA batteries for power), definitely the least fancy of the three. So the choice is between something cheap that takes good pictures, something tiny and cool that takes "all-right" pictures, and something a little more expensive and a little bigger that takes awesome pictures. All those are pretty similar cameras - similar price, at least, and roughly similar size. Each is the best deal for cameras with those respective attributes. How am I supposed to know how the customer will prioritize size, cost, and picture quality + manual control? What it comes down to is this: To whom is my duty greater? To the store or to the customers? "To the store" would means "make sure people BUY stuff, whatever it is, especially if it's expensive cameras with damage-protection warranties and lots of add-ons", and "To the customer" would mean "make sure people make decisions that are as informed and thoughtfully-made as possible". I know "To the store" is the right answer, but I still feel compelled to be as nice and honest to the customers as I can. And yes, I felt that way BEFORE selling that overly-expensive Casio to that rich lady).

And then, a couple things on the video were just really funny. Like when the news-host-wannabe narrator says "An ordinary salesman might make that mistake, but not you. You're a professional!". You mean other salespeople work for free, just for the fun of it? Whew, I'm so glad my boss does not realize that! (My official job title, by the way, is "Professional Sales Associate", which is where that comes from).

The other funny thing is when they in the video were saying that if you offer a customer a product (by which I mean: "So, would you like to buy one?") and they say no, then "don't worry, the sale is not over!". That makes it sound like the sale is a battle between salesman and customer, a duel, where we win if we sell something and they win if they don't buy anything. Although this model of retail is accurate, it's funny to think that corporate would make a video with a line that even admits the remote possibility of this model being useful, especially since every OTHER message they send us is about how important customers are and how we are to love them so much and treat them so nice and get them to like our store.

We got a new guy in the store today, a new "Professional Sales Associate". So our manager thought it might be a good idea for us to watch the video (she had been putting it off for me, because despite it being a required part of that training checklist I mentioned in the other post, I seem to be selling very well, and have been out-doing HER on more and more days). Right after we watched the video, wouldn't you know it, I had to talk to a customer over a long time about a camera (the T1 I mentioned at the beginning of the post), demonstrate it, talk about its features... In short, I pretty much reproduced a successful sale from the video, all the way to selling tons of extras, a damage-protection warranty, AND a membership card. A textbook sale if there ever was one. I later said to the new Associate: So, just like the video, huh? And he was like, "No, much more realistic. You didn't spend half an hour talking with him about his kids' dance classes and soccer games and about the baseball game last night". Good, at least it's not just me who thinks that salespeople ought not to try to live up to this chatty, over-friendly standard...

posted by Remus