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sales training Hertfordshire Archives - Tadpole Training

Jan 10
0
Janet Efere looking frustrated

What first impression are your team giving your customers?

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Do you love Greggs?

I love Greggs.

Usually Greggs are fabulous, but here is a tale of how just one person getting it wrong can undo a whole load of good stuff.

I was at Liverpool Street Station, London, on my way to deliver some training at Aldgate. I went to Greggs for a bit of brekkie!

To give you context, it was 8.30am and heaving, very noisy and the food counter is not visible to customers queuing on the right hand side, where I was.

I asked the assistant “do you have meat and vegetarian pasties?”

He said “yes”

Janet “OK I’ll have a vegetarian one and a coffee.”

Assistant ….. silence …. went off to get the food. He came back, gave me the little Greggs bag with my food in it and I paid.

Something was wrong. The bag was too heavy. He had given me both a vegetarian and a meat pasty.

Janet “Excuse me, there are two pasties in here”

Assistant “you asked for both”.

Janet “no, I only wanted the vegetarian one”

Assistant “no you didn’t – you asked me for the meat one as well”. Petulant stare from assistant.

Janet “I only want the vegetarian one”

Assistant “you asked for meat. I heard you”

[I literally felt my brain shift gear]

Janet “I clearly stated that I wanted vegetarian. Please take it back and refund me” (I think I may have used my ‘trainer’ voice here – I wasn’t in the mood for a debate)

Assistant visibly rolled eyes and huffed. Mumbled “you asked for meat”. Went to get manager.

Manager was polite and helpful and it was no trouble at all to refund me. I did make it known to him that I appreciated his help. I also relayed the conversation I had just had and suggested the staff member could do with some training.

So there are loads of levels to this, of course but here are a few:

🟣 However good your company or product is, the customer-facing staff you employ must fundamentally like dealing with people. Not once did I get a smile or even a suggestion of friendliness

🟣 Even if I was wrong (we do all make mistakes) the assistant should have cheerfully changed my order. A good assistant might even have apologised for the misunderstanding. Note that is different from saying ‘I’m sorry’ which implies they got it wrong. Apologising for the ‘misunderstanding’ is neutral and it does not suggest blame on either party.

🟣 Body language matters – rolling eyes will never a happy customer make!

🟣 Don’t argue with customers! End of!

🟣 A little bit of training would have gone a long way here. This was such a simple little exchange.

🟣 How many customers would one assistant see in a day? Hundreds probably. How would it affect your brand if, every day, one person was upsetting customer after customer?

Getting it right matters massively.

For a conversation about how I can help your customer facing team delight your customers instead of wind them up, send me a direct message.

And if you know anyone at Greggs ……!

Happy selling!

Does your customer facing team need a bit of a boost? For information on how we can create some bespoke training for you, let’s have a chat. Here is the link to my diary https://calendly.com/jefere/half-an-hour-with-janet

May 28
0
Janet Efere, Sales trainer saying 'shhhh'

Take some sales advice – you can win more sales by being quiet!

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As a sales trainer, I often try and get people to shut up more, to win more sales.

So do you know when to shut up?

It matters a lot.

Even among sign language speakers, studies show that typically we leave just a fraction of a second between taking turns to talk. BUT, our perception of silence differs dramatically across cultures – for example –

Research conducted at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands in Dutch and also in English found that when a silence in conversation stretched to four seconds, people started to feel unsettled.

But, here is where it starts to get really interesting – a separate study of business meetings found that Japanese people were happy with silences of 8.2 seconds – nearly twice as long as in Americans’ or anglohones’ meetings.

In the US, there is a saying that ‘the squeaky wheel gets the grease’ while in Japan it’s reckoned that ‘a silent man is the best one to listen to’.

In Japan, the power of silence is recognised in the concept of haragei (belly talk), which suggests that the best communication is when you don’t speak at all. “As soon as you need words there’s already a failure to understand each other so you’re repairing that failure by using words,” says Dr Deborah Tannen, a professor of linguistics at Georgetown University in the US.

WOW!

So, why does this matter in sales?

3-5 seconds is powerful.

I have won deals because I just shut up and let the customer work things out.

Do you think you should be speaking less?

#salestraining
#salestrainer
#salescoach
#listening

May 19
0
Janet Efere looking frustrated

What sales mistakes have you committed?

By | sales tips, Training | No Comments

What terrible mistakes have you committed in sales? As a sales trainer and sales coach I see loads of sales mistakes, but it doesn’t mean I haven’t committed a few in my time!

One of my worst was at Xerox. As a senior member of the team, I often had the newbies shadowing me.

We had this one call. The trainee hadn’t started yet, but had been on the training. So he was out with me for the day.

I had a meeting. It was with an ideal client. I’d done my research. I knew our solution would work for them.

I conducted the meeting.

It went perfectly (you know when everything works, you ask the right questions, you get the right answers?). It was one of them.

The client gave agreement to go ahead – I needed to submit the quote for it, to be rubber-stamped, but basically all-systems-go!

The trainee was ridiculously excited about how well it had gone – along the lines of ‘that was brilliant – I see how everything fits together, thank you so much Janet for showing me how it should be done”

So far so good.

Then I made my mistake. I can’t even pretend it was something I did …. it was something I didn’t do.

Can you guess what?

Well full marks to you if you got it …..

I never followed up.

I didn’t do the quote.

Then I felt bad because I didn’t do the quote straight away, so then it became this ‘thing’. I couldn’t even ring to apologise I was so embarrassed. Just all that effort down the drain.

Big lesson there.

Just do what you should do in the right order. No bells, no whistles. Just common sense.

Silly Janet (I’m smarter now I hope!)

So what are your howlers – if you’re brave enough to share?

May 17
0

Most people don’t understand sales

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Most people don’t understand sales.

So if you think these qualities will help you sell, they won’t

❌ having the ‘gift of the gab’


❌ never giving up on a deal


❌ having an answer for everything


❌ great sales people are born not made


❌ you have to be confident in sales

Whereas actually …..

✅ what you really need is the ability to ask great questions, shut up and actually listen to the answers


✅ Sometimes it makes sense to give up, so you can focus on the deals you can get over the line. Simple common sense not to bang your head against a brick wall


✅ In sales, as in life, none of us know everything. It’s fine to admit you don’t know something (if you pretend and then get it wrong, you will be in much worse trouble!)


✅ Sales is a skill – like learning to drive a car or ride a bike. It takes practice, so while some people may have an aptitude for it, it also means that anyone can learn it


✅ Confidence is an interesting one. Too confident and it seems like arrogance, not enough and you don’t seem trustworthy. You want to aim for the sort of quiet confidence true masters have.

So if you had some preconceived ideas about sales and selling, I hope this helped you.

Happy selling!