A few years back, as a junior in high school I founded my first business, a food trailer called Cake In A Cup. At the time, sales wasn’t really something I considered all that important; in all honesty, I kinda just hoped the giant trailer offering a delicious dessert would do my job for me and I could sit back and collect my earnings. I was impressively wrong.
While there were a number of other things I learned from and changed throughout the process, a better sales process was definitely one of the most critical for increasing the number of item sales I achieved at an event. The first major change I made was leaving the safety of the interior of the trailer and moving outside to engage people – through both conversation and sample bribery. While this ended up bringing definite improvement, my first few attempts simply resulted in me wasting product and time.
Why? It was simple, I wasn’t accomplishing any of the sales goals and techniques we’ve discussed in class – not even close! At the time, my approach was limited to something along the following lines:
“Hey, can I interest you in a cake sample? We’re parked right over there and we have some delicious gourmet cake in all of these flavors: flavor 1-5, we’ve also got x and y and z for cheap. We work with local suppliers and blah blah blah”
“Sure I’ll take a sample.”
And then they would keep walking right past my trailer without a dollar going into my pocket.
Without even realizing it, I was committing some major sales errors, I was talking about things they couldn’t have cared less about, not to mention doing all the talking myself, and not really engaging them in conversation for any meaningful amount of time. Luckily, through trial and error I slowly improved my positioning, and evolved towards engaging people in conversation, then offering a sample, and ultimately avoiding the major spiel and drew a considerably larger amount of customers.
taylorjt23 
Bondre24 
wheelerne24
Wow that is a super valuable lesson. It’s awesome that you have been able to get lots of real hands on experience in sales and business at such a young age. It’s great that you learned that extremely valuable lesson in your teenage years. It takes lots of salespeople well into their adult lives to learn that fact. This knowledge that you have in sales will serve you for years to come.
This was a great post that emphasizes the importance of a salesperson to actively engage with customers rather than relying only on the product and its features. I agree with your advice to start with genuine conversation and then offer samples to increase customer interest in the product later on.