Selling as a Barista

For the past three or four years, I’ve worked at various coffee shops, getting to interact and see new and regular customers. This has been such a fun experience, even though I have encountered some customers that are very picky about their coffee and can get upset if you don’t make it exactly how they want it. However, one of my favorite things is whenever customers ask what I recommend. A lot of times I was able to point out my favorite drinks and or suggest certain things and they would end up getting it because of my recommendation. This would even work whenever they would ask if another item or pastry was good and I would suggest it to them. Then because of this, they would purchase the item they weren’t at first going to get, but were convinced to. I always felt encouraged after this would happen because I felt like I was doing my job well and helping the business.

Selling in this position was not very hard because people were already coming into the coffee shop prepared to buy something, but my job was to make the drink the best I could and to suggest other things that I thought the customer would also enjoy. This made my job easy because I knew that my customer was already in a buying mood, and just needed encouragement and suggestions. Every once in a while though, a customer would come in planning to buy something, and after looking at a menu or changing their mind, they would walk right back out. This would make me want to persuade them to stay, but I knew that if I did, they would be less likely to come back and actually buy something in the future. I think it made me realize that whenever you are just understanding and don’t try to force things on customers that don’t want them, they will be more willing to come back. This is why we did have so many regulars at our coffee shop, because they trusted us and felt comfortable that we were going to be consistent and give them only what they asked for.