Take Time to Prepare the Consumer

I remember as a young kid wondering why the firefighters were taking so long to get started. The size of the blaze frightened me. I saw how close it was to houses my friends lived in. Although I was standing across a wide street from the fire and the arriving fire trucks were between me and the flames, I could feel the heat and hear the crackling. As I smelled the smoke, I thought I might soon have trouble breathing and maybe should get away. But I stayed, fascinated by why the firefighters were taking so long to get started.
     They pulled the hoses from the trucks, unfolded the hoses and spread them out on the street, seemed to be checking the hoses. I saw them hook one hose to a fire hydrant and others to a tanker truck. Some of them were doing things out of my view, but I did know for sure there was no water coming out the hoses, and the blaze was growing.
     I saw a chief’s car arrive and a group of firefighters talking with the chief and each other as they pointed to different places in and around the fire. Finally, some in the group nodded and they all briskly walked off in different directions and the streams of water started blasting out of the hoses. But why had the firefighters taken so long to get started?, I wondered.
     What a few more years of life revealed to me was that the firefighters had not taken long at all to get started. Everything I'd seen and now recall was necessary preparation. They’d started as soon as they arrived.
     At your retail store, are you doing the necessary preparation before moving to close a sale?
     The first impression you’d like to leave with guests in your store is you can help them. Shoppers prefer to give their business to helpful people. A consumer’s brain starts evaluating a retailer within seconds of initial contact. The impressions that follow are interpreted to fit in with those first impressions. If those first few seconds convey that you want to be helpful, whatever you do next becomes more likely to be interpreted by the consumer as helpful.
     Do your guests want to settle in before being spoken to? Do they only want to know where the restrooms are? Take time to prepare the consumer for the sale.

For your profitability: Sell Well: What Really Moves Your Shoppers

Click below for more: 
Catch Customers by Helping Early 
Beware Open Sell