Sleep on this
My wife and I decided we needed a new mattress for our bed. The truth is, I am a very restless sleeper
and my tossing and turning and getting in and out of bed during the night was disturbing her sleep.
We figured out a solution to our problem and went shopping.
Our first stop was at a well-known furniture and bedding store on Auckland’s North Shore. Shortly
after entering the store, we were approached by a pleasant salesperson and we told him what we were
looking for. “Yes, I have that mattress,” he said and he took us over to where it was on
display. We looked at it, poked it and eventually lay on it while the salesman watched us silently.
I asked a couple of questions which he answered competently and then he confirmed the price was indeed
what was written on the price tag. I gave my wife one of those knowing looks that says, let’s
get out of here, and we thanked him for his assistance.
We drove down the street to another large but more down-market furniture and bedding store where we
had shopped in the past. As we got out of the car, we noticed the store next door sold nothing but bedroom
furniture and was appropriately named, The Bed Stop. Since we had not been there before, we decided
to give it a try. We were met by a saleswoman who introduced herself as Jenny and asked if she could
be of assistance. I told her the name of the mattress we wanted to buy. Like the salesman in the store
we first went into, she took us straight to the mattress. She too watched silently as we poked and prodded,
sat on, and then lay on the mattress.
When we had finished our highly scientific investigation into the mattress’s quality and were
standing back and looking at it, she asked, “So, what’s the concept?”
“Excuse me?” I said thinking I had misheard her question.
“What’s the concept?” she repeated. “What are you trying to achieve?”
I recognised where she was going with this and decided to work against her to see what she would do. “You
don’t need to know that,” I said curtly. “I asked for a particular mattress and you
have shown it to me. That’s enough.”
“No,” she said in a gentle voice. “If you tell me what you are trying to do, I may
be able to show you some other options. So, what’s the concept?” she asked with a smile
and twinkling eyes. I told her the problem we were trying to solve.
With an even bigger smile, she asked us to follow her to another part of the store. “What do
you think of this?” she asked pointing at a mattress that had a great big sign stitched to it
that read, ‘The Do Not Disturb Mattress’. What a wonderful name! Talk about selling what
your customers are buying. None of this, ‘Slumberland,’ or ‘Posturepaedic’ or ‘Dreamworld’ branding.
This company wanted to make an immediate connection with its customers.
My wife was ready to buy the mattress right then and there but Jenny suggested we lie on it and then
instructed me to toss and turn and to get on and off the mattress. It passed our test and I said we
were finished looking and would buy it. But Jenny was not finished with us. She showed us two more ‘Do
Not Disturb’ mattresses, each better in quality and more expensive than the one before. In each
case we simulated my restless sleeping pattern while my wife judged the effect my antics had on someone
sleeping on her side of the bed. In the end, you guessed it, we bought the most expensive of the three.
It was clearly the most comfortable and least disturbing mattress.
While we were completing the paperwork, I told Jenny I was in the customer service business and congratulated
her on how well she had handled the sale. I was impressed with how her aim had been to make us successful
rather than to get us to buy something. She knew she could not do that unless she understood what we
were trying to do. Hence her question, “What’s the concept?”
We all know that the first step in selling is to understand the customer’s need yet the reality
is that most salespeople are simply order-takers (like the chap in the first store we visited) because
they respond to the customer’s request for a product or service and do not ask any probing questions.
A study in the Harvard Business Review last year found the second biggest mistake salespeople make,
according to their customers, is they do not listen to understand the customer’s needs.
I then asked Jenny where she had developed her skills. She told me her father had taught her. When
she was growing up, he had been a salesman for AMP and for years he was their top salesperson in New
Zealand. “Nobody else in the company could figure out how he did it,” she laughed. “But
all he did was find out what people wanted to do and then helped them to do it.” She added that
her brother was now a very successful insurance broker because he also did what their father had taught
them.
While we were having this conversation, one of Jenny’s fellow salespeople was sitting next to
her doing her own paperwork. She was totally disinterested in what we were talking about.
The moral of the story is that to be a successful salesperson you need to aim to make your customers
successful. Find out what they want to do and then help them to do it.
And do not be put off by curt customers!
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