Like lots of other teenagers, I jumped into the workforce when I was about 15 years old. My Dad ran sound for a restaurant with live music, and every Thursday night he would take me and show me how to run the soundboard. Because I was in and out of that restaurant so much, when I became old enough to start working, they were the first to offer me a job. From that day until I turned 19, I worked part time in a restaurant setting, and became very familiar with the ins and outs of the food industry. I worked almost every job a restaurant had to offer, except the manager position of course. I saw the impact waiters had on a buyers decision, I saw how upset a customer could get if they didn’t get what they thought they would get, and I saw how employee relationships can make or break a business success. Working in the food industry for so long taught me so many essential lessons about life, but the biggest lesson I took was from when I worked behind the bar.
The day I turned 18, the restaurant I was with at the time offered me a bar-back position, giving an opportunity to make significantly more money than I was making as a server assistant. Working behind a bar was a completely new experience, and I was able to learn so much about people during that time. But, like I said before, the most influential lesson I learned was how to sell.
Because the bar I worked at was a craft-cocktail bar, people paid high prices for drinks they didn’t really know much about. Being somewhat of a shadow of the main bartender, I was able to see how a bartender would sell drinks to a customer. The process was long and extremely detail oriented. The bartender would start the selling process like a conversation, while simultaneously gathering information about the customer through questions. He or she would ask the customer what kinds of foods they liked, how they liked to prepare their coffee, really anything to get a read on what the customer would like. The selling process was simple, gather information about the customer, and then recommend a drink that would suite their pallet. No pushy techniques or gimmicks, just a recommendation after a stimulating conversation.
After learning in Sales in the Startup that this is one of the best techniques to of selling, I can see now that I had been observing this long before I took the class.
BoweryJE22
It’s really interesting that you noticed that the way the bartender made a sale was by asking questions to really figure out what the customer wanted. I feel like the sales techniques we have been taught in this class have shown us that the most successful salespeople already implement these things whether they realize it or not.