A couple years ago now when I was selling for Daisy Pops. I was at a networking event down in Pittsburgh. Specifically, it was a glorified career fair. While I was looking for jobs for myself, I attempted to use the opportunity to sell cake pops to the companies there. Daisy Pops has a whole product line for corporate events and they do a good job with them. My payment was in the form of wholesaling the order and taking the discount. Of which did not work out well at all, my margins were way to small. Setting up shop at events often had a setup fee which would eat away at most if not all of my profits. Anyways back to this event, I went around trying to sell these cake pops. Talking about what makes them different than other cake pops, showing them how cool their logo would look on a cake pop, etc. Basically I was selling features and some benefits. By the end of the day I talked to a couple dozen people and left with zero sales. However, I did leave with some neat advice from the last person I talked to. He was a veteran salesperson with a couple decades of experience. He had me restart my pitch over and over again while having me make small adjusts each time. Each time he had me focus more on him than the product itself, and what the product could do for him and his company. Though running into him at the start of the night would have been more ideal, I was happy to get a free sales lesson.
By FrenchJA21
trischlerba23 
maysrj23 
BlankAD21 2 thoughts on “Learning the Hard Way”
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This is an awesome little story about learning from experience. That night must have sucked, but now looking back, you can appreciate the lessons you learned from it. I remember hosting events when I was in high school and the ones that weren’t bad, my hand was being held by those with more experience than me, and for those where no one helped, I had dismal attendance. Going home after those events was always embarrassing but I always learned something.
I really enjoyed this story, especially since it touched on a big part of our class discussion about making the sale about the customer. That night doesn’t sound like a good time at all, but it’s awesome that you were able to gain some insight into better selling techniques. Have you had the opportunity to utilize your new approach to selling? It would be interesting to see how many more customers you can close a sale with using the customer-focused approach!