Don't Hard Sell Me Young Man!

My family went to Orlando last week for our once in a lifetime visit to Disney land. I say 'once in a lifetime' because much though we loved it, we proved not to be lifetime fanatics of the experience.

However, Disney is not the focus of my blog this week, but rather the sales process we were exposed to at the resort we stayed at. We decided that we would take advantage of being able to get half priced Disney tickets in exchange for sitting through a 90 minute presentation on the resort. Clearly they were determined that we would buy a timeshare but we were equally determined not to.

Thus we embarked upon a fairly humorous 90 minute experience.

Firstly I have to say that if we were thinking of buying, the salesperson would have inadvertently persuaded us not to. The first mistake he made was having said that the presentation would take 90 minutes, and then looking insulted when we informed him that we would be leaving after that period of time. He was clearly used to saying that it would be 90 minutes and then holding his hapless customers hostage for an indefinite period of time until they signed on the dotted line. It clearly never occurred to him that we might be trying to use one of those Disney tickets in order to make the most of the rest of our day.

The second mistake he made was talking almost exclusively to my husband – a real ‘no, no’ when it comes to selling to women. Women have very sensitive antenna to being ignored in favor of their male cohorts, and I am an extreme case. My husband knows this about me, so he kept glancing nervously in my direction, while I made obnoxious comments to try and annoy the sales person. He clearly didn't know that a much more successful sales strategy is to give the woman over 50% of your attention; and she will like you a great deal more and be a more effective ally in trying to convince her husband to buy whatever it is you are trying to sell. Thirdly, he might have been able to win me over if he had spent the time to find out how I like to spend my time on vacation and where are my preferred destinations. He could have then made his sales strategy far more personally relevant. Instead, he couldn't wait to get out his calculator and charts to show the great deal we would be getting. This was a mistake because like most women, I immediately glazed over. He was making the mistake of selling me the price rather than selling me the experience - the rest off my short attention span floated out the window. The nail was finally driven into the coffin when the salesperson told me that we had to decide right there or else ‘no sale’. Women almost universally hate the ‘hard sell’ approach. If you aren’t comfortable giving her some time to think about what you have to offer – in the case of large ticket items – then you probably won’t make the sale at all.

Well, true to form, we didn't buy, although I am still a little worried that the salesperson is going to appear by my bed in the middle of the night, waving a contract and trying to take back the Disney tickets.