I was running a one-man show. I did everything in my shop and it was a problem. It was hard to get anything done because I was running in several directions at the same time. I found myself doing bench work early in the morning because customers were taking up most of my day. And of course, I was worrying about every dime, and I wasn’t making much money.
My consulting group was insisting that I needed to hire a salesperson, but I kept thinking it was a waste of money. I also didn’t know how to find a good one. Woody and Joe, my consultants, insisted that a good salesperson easily paid their own salaries and made the business money. As a bench jeweler, I couldn’t see it.
On a ski day trip to Mount Snow in Vermont I met this attractive young girl named Dee. She was wearing a boys ski jacket that dwarfed her, but she was bounding down the slopes with my group of friends. After we were done for the day we stopped at a bar. It turned out Dee had just moved back from Colorado and needed a job. Well, I had enjoyed skiing with her and my friends all seemed to know her so why not hire her? And so I did.
I had no idea what to expect, but the idea of a pretty girl standing at the counter chatting while I worked my but off was not what I wanted. And that was not what she wanted either.
Dee genuinely enjoyed the opportunity. I gave her books on salesmanship to read and projects to work on. She worked every bit as hard as I did, writing thank you notes to every customer daily, organizing displays, helping with marketing, even walking around to people she knew handing out business cards.
Dee was a machine. By the end of the first year, we had doubled our sales and I was making money. By the end of the second year, Dee was generating ten times her salary in sales.
I made Dee the sales manager and told her to hire more people like her. And she did. One after another she hired folks who followed her take on salesmanship. Active, presumptive selling.
Not everyone worked out but most did because she set a pace and a standard that was clear and measurable. Every salesperson had a Rolodex with their customers’ names and event dates. They kept wish lists at every price point and communicated frequently with their customers.
This was a culture where salespeople developed relationships with their customers and brought people into the store. Not the culture of waiting for someone to walk in. It worked so well that we ended up, with six people working in a 600-square-foot store at the end of a dead-end street, being one of the most successful stores in the entire downtown.
The key to hiring good employees is to see them as an asset that will generate income and set clear expectations. Then offer them training and treat them very well.
David Geller will remember Dee. I took her to one of his classes along with two other staff members. He seemed frustrated that they knew the answers to all his questions about selling. After the class, he told me that he had never met a staff that had taken his book and teachings to heart so well. They had because they knew that if they excelled I would reward them.
I became so close to Dee that she was my daughter’s godmother. Unfortunately, she died very young of lung cancer. She had never smoked and was one of the fittest people I ever knew. She collapsed skiing one day and died a year later. I owe her much of my past success.
