Sales Experience as a Buyer

This past weekend my family took me out to go shopping at Best Buy. The first thing I noticed was about 5 workers sitting on their phones as my family browsed through the isles. I found this very interesting. First thing that came to my head was that Best Buy must not incentive their workers enough to make a sales effort with every customer. We were in the market for an apple watch and didn’t know much about them at all. Eventually we asked for help from a worker. He explained to us all the features of each version of the apple watch, but that was it. He didn’t seem to have any care about who we were or why we were in the market for an apple watch. He just gave us a brief description of what each one did, waiting for us to decide if we wanted to buy it or not. Through the first half of this semester, I have learned that it is about getting to know your customers so you can then explain how your product benefits their lives. The key takeaway is that it must be personable. This Best Buy worker just talked about the features and didn’t truly listen to what we were looking for. This goes against the 70/30 rule we learned about in class. A salesperson should listen 70 percent of the time and only talk for 30 percent. Another thing that stood out to me was his mood. When coach DiDonato came in to speak his energy was contagious. It made you want to buy. This Best Buy employee seemed sluggish and as if he was just collecting the paycheck. His energy made me feel more concerned with ending the conversation than making a purchase. These are just few takeaways for improvement I noticed from this Best Buy employee. We ended up finding a much more energetic employee to give us a rundown of all the options with whom we then made a purchase.