I want to tell you a funny story. I was reminded of it last week when a friend/client (the best combo) replied to an article I wrote about sales. In fact, it was pretty interesting how many people resonated with that article. Seems like we’ve all had those moments when we wanted to pitch our product/service but held back for fear of being a sleazeball.
So I figured I’d share a story with you. A lesson in how NOT to sell. And how doing it badly can have a really negative impact on your brand.
Rewind a few years and I was working at a gym in a little town called Yamba, on the East coast of Australia. I’d just started studying to become a coach, and so was in that transition zone, when you’re psyched to start your new business, but not quite ready to take the leap. Anyhow, this gym seemed like a pretty good place to work. I’d had a brief interview with the owners, who had 2 other gyms on the coast, and after a few weeks was managing the day to day operations.
It was not a challenging role. To be honest, it was pretty freaking boring. But I was grateful for the work and loved the fact that I could go surf in between split shifts and still fit in enough study time. I remember in those first few weeks, one of the owners called me up to run through her sales protocol. She was, um, a little intense and made it very clear that I had to follow her instructions to the letter.
She told me to look under the desk and pull out a black folder. I grabbed it and had a look inside. It was full of contact details. She told me that every day, in between dealing with customers, running classes & cleaning the gym, I needed to call at least 15 of these contacts and try and sell them a membership. Hmm. I asked her where the contacts had come from, ‘Oh, most of them are old members or people who had at some point entered a competition to win a membership’.
Yikes. I hate cold calling at the best of times. But I sucked it up, said I’d do it, and hung up the phone. Over the next few days, I worked my way down the list of numbers. Again and again, I encountered people who were kinda pissed at me for calling. I’d interrupted their day and was trying to sell them something they clearly didn’t want.
On a call with the boss, I told her that perhaps there were better ways to bring in new members. She laughed at me and told me she’d been in the industry for years and that she knew best. So I carried on…. hating every minute. As I made my way through the file, I noticed that some of the people had already been contacted and told us that they weren’t interested. So I skipped those ones altogether.
But later on that week, I got shouted at because I’d missed them out, and when I questioned the logic in calling people who’d told us to stop calling, I started to realise my job was on the line.
It became pretty obvious why the business was struggling. The members were grumpy (turns out they wasted so much time trying to get new ones, they didn’t take care of their current ones ). The high staff turnover (no-one likes to be micro-managed !). And the complete lack of business smarts.
I think I lasted another couple of months. I hated going to work. In the end, I refused to make any more cold calls. I put together a marketing plan for them & a detailed strategy to implement it. I’m not sure they even opened the file haha.
Maybe it was the entrepreneur in me, but I couldn’t stand working in a business that was clearly making so many mistakes. With every phone call, we were tarnishing the name of the brand. I can still remember hearing people sigh when I told them where I was calling from. Not long after I left, the gym closed down. I’m pretty sure we’d pissed off every person that lived in that town. And when you’re a bricks & mortar business relying on the support of your local community, it doesn’t take long for your crappy sales techniques to impact your bottom line.
I remember my last day there… and how stoked I was to hop in my car knowing I’d never set foot in the place again. But more importantly, knowing that I’d learnt first-hand exactly how NOT to do sales. So this is what I want you to take from this story. Whether you like it or not, selling is a vital part of your business. If you have a sucky sales plan (or don’t have one at all !), then you need to know that it’s affecting your chances of success.
If you do it right (and yes, it takes work), you’ll start to see that sales don’t need to be painful, or awkward. In fact, you’ll realise that actually, when you do it right, it doesn’t feel like selling at all.