Tag Archives: salesperson

January 5, 2011

SaLeS ThAt RoCKEd My WOrLd

By Hamza

Hi Guys,

Here’s the beginning of something I promised my friend Jason Cupp I would do… I’m going to share my life with you… so here we go…

Well first of all, for those of you that don’t know…I am a twin… identical. We’ll talk more about that later… but what I want to share with you are little, little stories of my life along with what I’ve learned from them.

“A smart person is someone who learns from their mistakes, a wise person is someone who learns from other’s mistakes” – Not that everything i’m going to share with you is a mistake lol… they’re just my experiences.

Ever since I was 13, I’ve been working… started off as a stock boy at my uncle’s shoe store… got paid very little in dollars ($10/day for 12 hour days), but got paid like a millionaire in experience and knowledge…. Today I can confidently say that I can tell what a person is like by the type of shoes to wear 😉 (something I learned from my uncles)

I soon learned how to be an excellent salesperson, work the sales floor, and make customers feel comfortable buying their shoes; it was mostly a men’s shoe store. I was 14 or 15 when I was beating guys 2 to 5 times my age in sales numbers… of course i felt like a star lol but what I didn’t know was how much more I was learning – paid off in millions (dollars) later on in life. –

Caution: curses of knowing shoes is you end up always liking the $300 – $400 shoes because you understand quality =)

Story

Customer walks in… I walk up to the customer… say “Hi, may I help you?” <— one of the worst opening questions to ask a customer when they first walk in! Customer looks at me, gives me a pity smile and says, “No thanks, just looking” …. yeah i know you’re looking smarta**, you’re in a shoe store for crying out loud! Anyhow, I back off, and go stand behind the counter.

My Uncle comes up to me and says, “go up to him and stand close to him”…. WHAT? the guy just said “just looking”, i can’t just go up to him and stand close by, it’ll make him feel uncomfortable; better yet, it’ll make me feel extremely uncomfortable! So I asked my uncle why and his response was “Just go” in a very mono tone(to me it was scary). I call my uncle “Salauddin Taya” in our language (urdu) (Salauddin was his name and ‘Taya’ means dad’s older brother) – this guy was like a coconut; extremely tough on the out side and mushy on the inside, but being the scardey cat i was, i quietly nodded, and walked up to the guy; talk about a hard place and a rock!

The guy looked at me walking up, picked up a shoe he’d been staring at for a few mins, looked back at me questioning himself if he should even talk to me, and then just asked me for my opinion on the shoe himself. We ended up having a couple of laughs, he bought two shoes and a belt and i threw in 2 socks on the house. Be advised it doesn’t work like this every time – it worked for me though and something clicked in my head, which is why i remember this story so clearly.

Here’s what I learned…

My opening line absolutely sucked! So my uncle used to force me to keep making more attempts at approaching customers that walked in the door, so i could eventually learn how to approach people confidently and in a charming manner, so they wouldn’t just shut me out as soon as they looked at me. The result? I have absolutely no problem going up to anyone today and striking a conversation about the most random things =) and i credit the root of that to my uncle! Thanks Salaudding Taya!

Side Story

Before High school, i was a very shy kid. Besides the group of close friends that i had (close to 20 of them – we were always in the same classes growing up) i didn’t have the guts to open my mouth around people i didn’t know. Well if you know me now, you probably won’t believe me, because you’ll that i make a fool out of myself, laugh with everyone else and everyone else is at easy pretty quickly after that lol… so what helped me change that?

This small story was the beautiful cause of my change from a ‘super duper’ shy kid, that would not even be able to sit on a table or bench if a girl was sitting there to someone who loves talking to anyone and everyone and getting to know them on more than just the surface the very first time i meet them! =)