Salespeople hate hearing, “No”.

Jerry Kohl, the founder of Brighton Collectibles, once told me that he used to require reps to come to a weekly meeting armed with two “No’s”. My initial response was, “Wow that must make for some negative meetings. Jerry said, “No, you would be surprised how many “Yes’s” they found looking for those two “No’s”.

Interesting; by making the dreaded “No” okay he got people calling on stores that they might otherwise drive on by thinking, “No, they wouldn’t be interested”. They went in thinking, “I’ll get one of my required “No’s”, and damn, it became a “Yes” and they had to keep on looking for the “No’s”.

In Retail Selling Made Easy I say, “If NO to the wrong item is not alright with the salesperson, then YES to the right item will not be okay with the customer.
The minute you try to sell me something that I don’t like, there is something else I don’t like.
Guess what that is.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 22nd, 2007 at 8:38 pm and is filed under Retail Selling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.