{"id":809,"date":"2015-03-15T14:48:20","date_gmt":"2015-03-15T14:48:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gccwebsites.com\/startupsales\/?p=809"},"modified":"2015-03-15T14:52:01","modified_gmt":"2015-03-15T14:52:01","slug":"the-fateful-mistake","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gccwebsites.com\/startupsales\/the-fateful-mistake\/","title":{"rendered":"The Fateful Mistake"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Anger<\/a>Yelling, frustration, confusion, and annoyance can all be part of selling and unfortunately, sometimes they are directed at the salesperson. This was my experience while working at a sausage sandwich stand but thankfully, things don\u2019t always end up the way they started. Here\u2019s how the story goes.<\/p>\n

It was a blistery fall day at Booth\u2019s Corner Farmer\u2019s Market in Marcus Hook PA. and we were as busy as ever. As I hurried to help the next customer, I asked an elderly man, \u201cHave you been helped sir?\u201d Apparently, he thought I said, \u201cCan I help you sir?\u201d and replied, \u201cYes.\u201d And so the confusion began. Thinking that he had already been helped, I moved to the next customer. Mid-way through taking her order I realized my fatal mistake. The elderly fellow whom I had unintentionally skipped was looking at with wide-eyed with disbelief. \u201cI can\u2019t believe you just did that,\u201d he said. \u201cYou saw that I wasn\u2019t being helped and you intentionally helped the next person.\u201d I apologized and told him that it was a complete accident but he wasn\u2019t appeased. He continued berating me for the next few minutes until I was able to take his order.<\/p>\n

After he got his food and sat down, I thought everything would be ok but I was sorely mistaken. He sat on one of the bar stools in the nearby seating area, but instead of eating his food he sat sideways in the bar stool and gave me the death glare for the next five minutes. To make matters worse, I looked up at one point with a huge smile on my face and made direct eye contact with him. Of course, he didn\u2019t know that I wasn\u2019t actually laughing at him but simply smiling at a comment made by one of my co-workers. He got out of his seat, walked over to the counter, and said, \u201cI see you back there. You think this is funny. You purposely didn\u2019t help me, and now you\u2019re laughing at me.\u201d I apologized and tried to explain the situation but he wouldn\u2019t hear it. By this time matters were getting out of hand so as soon as I had a few moments I walked out to the counter where he was sitting. I tried to explain the situation as clearly as possible, telling him that I hadn’t intentionally skipped him in line and that I wasn’t actually laughing at him. I finished by telling him that I was genuinely sorry for anything I had done wrong. This seemed to calm him down a bit and he grumbled a begrudging \u201cThank you\u201d as I walked away.<\/p>\n

Obviously sales doesn’t always go as planned. However, I think the lessons to learn from this story are of attunement and humility. Going out and apologizing to a furious customer that day certainly wasn’t the highest thing on my bucket list, but after I got over myself and showed a little humility, the situation looked a lot different. During a sale it\u2019s important to understand where a customer is coming from, and what they are looking for before trying to sell to them. Humility and attunement make that possible.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yelling, frustration, confusion, and annoyance can all be part of selling and unfortunately, sometimes they are directed at the salesperson. This was my experience while working at a sausage sandwich stand but thankfully, things don\u2019t always end up the way they started. Here\u2019s how the story goes. It was a blistery fall day at Booth\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-809","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gccwebsites.com\/startupsales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/809","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gccwebsites.com\/startupsales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gccwebsites.com\/startupsales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gccwebsites.com\/startupsales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/49"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gccwebsites.com\/startupsales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=809"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gccwebsites.com\/startupsales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/809\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":812,"href":"https:\/\/gccwebsites.com\/startupsales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/809\/revisions\/812"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gccwebsites.com\/startupsales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=809"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gccwebsites.com\/startupsales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=809"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gccwebsites.com\/startupsales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=809"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}