Opinion: The difference between clerking and selling

Times are tough. Good help is hard to find. Got it.

But wouldn't you think, if you weren't making money, you'd change your ways?

I'm talking about sales and how your crew is or isn't doing it. Here's how what I call "low-hanging fruit clerking" goes:

Customer walks in. Employee yells across the counter, "How are you today? Looking for anything special?"

Customer looks around, after a while asks employee, "Do you have this in a set?"

"I do right over here."

"I'll take it."

That is not selling.

That would be about as much like selling as a guy walking into a Ford dealership: "Yeah, I'm looking for the Mustang GT 5-speed in grey with black seats." "Right over here."

That is clerking. It is what passes for customer service. A real sale would be if the guy came in for a Focus and drove off in the Mustang because the salesperson found things in common and the customer opened up to him that he always wanted one since he was 16 in Toledo, Ohio and first saw it on the Ed Sullivan Show.

True selling is the whole tree, not just picking what you can reach without effort. When a customer thinks they can't afford it, when the wife says "you better think about it," when the customer selects a product that won't do what they want — that is when selling makes the difference. It's not pushy, and it's not cheap or tacky. It's the stuff of American business success.

When I was selling western wear in college at a store in the Santa Monica Place mall, I had a guy who came in to the store and immediately told me he needed a red shirt for a party. "Why red?" I asked. "My girlfriend told me to." I showed him how red really wasn't a good color for his skin, shared the mistake I'd made getting one once and found a good blue shirt he would wear more than once to a party.  He also got a pair of boots and jeans — about $300 worth.

He returned to me after he received a handwritten note from me thanking him for his purchase. "You know, most people would have just gotten me the shirt and been done with it. But you took the time to educate me.  Everybody said I looked so great, I should get more, so I'm changing my wardrobe." With that he purchased thousands of dollars of product.

Low-hanging fruit would have been to clerk a $30 shirt.

You want to compete in a global marketplace? Standout from a world that is overbuilt with power centers? Take money out of the business instead of putting it in every month? Reach higher. Hire salespeople. Encourage them to reach higher with every sale.

As any gardener can tell you, the ripest fruit hangs at the top, not near the bottom.