Raise sales by leaving your customer alone for a bit and be patient with him

Today when I went to Borås Knalleland for a bit of shopping it came clear to me, when walking around in a store whats really important.

Many storeowners either seem to think that I want to steal something since they follow me around the store without saying something or they start talking to me before I have seen whats in the store. These to people lost me as a customer because I got stressed and couldnt concentrate on what I was there for, to shop.

So I put together a short list whats important for sales personell to think of in a store (and with some creativity this can be translated to online channels as well):

• Let the customer look around a couple of minutes before you jump at him to try to sell, he needs to have this time to accommodate with the store and filter out the important products in the store. A polite "hello" or "welcome" is of course a natural thing that you should say immediately the customer enters.
• Be intuitive about the customer, if he looks confused, go to him and ask if you can help him out
• If you start helping a customer out, dont give the impression that you actually dont have the time to speak to him because you want to go to the next customer. If, and only if, the customers just seem to talk to you about the weather and you have lots of people in line it is ok to be polite once again and say "it is nice talking to you, but I have more customer in line"
• Eyecontact at the counter, dont stand there when the customer is paying and just look at the cashier. Look at the customer, a smile perhaps, and give him his receipt and a "thank you for shopping, hope you will be satisfied"
• If you got the time, try to say "good by" to customers leaving the store without buying things. This way they see that you actually did not ignore them and its a higher chance of getting free advertising.

Its really simple because if you are polite and give the customer a bit of breathing space before giving him the commercial parts its probably a happy customer and happy customer often shop or at least give you free advertising to his friends.

You could say, and this goes for B2B online business as well as physical stores, that you need to get a customer interested in your things before you start with the commercial messages to him.

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