In the Jan. 2009 NOBS Marketing Letter (Dan Kennedy and Bill Glazer) Dan tells the story of his adventure to a mall.
He spent hundreds of dollars in several stores and not ONE person offered him a decent sales pitch for an upsell or add on. ONE person tried, and he gets some credit, but Dan says it was a lame attempt.
Elmer Wheeler was a conultant to retail stores and his Tested Sentences came out of the retail trenches. Today, retail hires clerks. Many rude ones too.
Clerks over salespeople. And in this same issue of NOBS Marketing Letter they list the 1,956 "departures" from the scene including the stores of MACYS, Home Depot, Wilson's Leather, Foot Locker, Zales and many other names.
Dan suggested and I'm going to agree with him...maybe if the stores had a little more salesmanship (which is the ultimate customer service) and fewer clerks standing around gossiping with each other...some of these 1,956 stores and the thousands of employees losing jobs...
might still be viable.
So, start your year off with a review of this tome I wrote several years ago:
http://www.angelfire.com/biz/gjbiz/p...tasproduct.pdf
The PROSPECT as Product. If you haven't read it in awhile, give it once over.
The stores and companies that will survive and thrive in this down economy will be the ones who put the customer first. Amazing, yet seldom used concept.
Did your holiday shopping mirror Dan's and mine? I couldn't find a knowledeable clerk in any of the stores I visited. If you have a positive experience, lets give them some free press. Wish I could start it off, but not a single store had ONE decent clerk to assit me in my holdiay shopping.
Gordon Jay Alexander
http://www.angelfire.com/biz/gjbiz/p...tasproduct.pdf