Worst sales girl ever

I was terrible at my first part time job. Objectively terrible, as evidenced by the leaderboard in the back office (yes, an actual leaderboard. I was always at the bottom).

I worked at a Duty Free store in Melbourne, selling perfume, cameras and cartons of cigarettes, in between classes at Melbourne Uni where I was studying useful things like avant garde Japanese theatre and the homo-eroticism in Rambo:First Blood (best degree ever). It was the 90s so I sold a lot of Benson & Hedges, perfume bottles shaped like torsos and an awful lot of CK One.

For those assuming I worked in an airport, you would be wrong because there are weird rules in Australia which allow you to buy Duty Free in city stores. The customer would show us their passport and plane ticket, we would log what they purchased on a computer system, seal up the clear plastic bag with a stapler and attach the paperwork to the outside. They could either take it with them and declare it as they went through customs, or we could have it stored and shipped to the airport to pick up when they passed through customs on the day of their flight. Either way, it had to stay sealed until they passed through customs or they were fined $10,000.

It was a fun job in many ways. I chatted to people about where they were headed on holiday, or where they were from. Customers were generally in a great mood (holiday! No tax!). I enjoyed the power (no sir, you cannot take 10 cartons of Marlborough Lights out of the country). I felt a little bit like a travel agent and learnt the most common flight numbers by heart (QF93, ahh are you going to visit Disneyland while you’re in LA?).

But selling stuff? I was awful at it.

I earned a regular retail hourly rate, which was not bad for a part time uni job at 19. But we had to log every one of our sales under our staff code so they knew exactly what each of us had sold. There were bonuses for the top sales staff. I never got a bonus.

The leaderboard hung on the wall of store room which we were in and out of all day. There was no stock kept on the shop floor because you couldn’t just walk up to the counter and buy anything and walk out with it. So it was all about the sales. And I was bad at selling.

How did someone so bad at selling get this job you might wonder. Well, funny story.

Every single staff member had a second language (for obvious reasons, since we served a lot of foreign visitors). We had little flags on our name badges, just like a flight attendant. The shop sat on the edge of Chinatown, so a lot of the staff were Chinese Australian who spoke Cantonese or Mandarin (or both). There were a few who spoke Japanese. The white staff pretty much all spoke Greek. And then there was me.

My boss, a terrifyingly excellent saleswoman who seemed to be able to get anyone to purchase a bottle of Johnny Walker Blue, had been so excited to interview a white girl who spoke an asian language that she hired me on the spot. I had just come back from a year working for an NGO in Thailand and my Thai was pretty decent. She also loved that I was studying photography at Uni and that I knew my way around expensive cameras (biggest ticket items in the store). I got a badge with a tiny Thai flag on it (thrilling). She had such high hopes for me. Which I failed to live up to, month after month.

Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash

Now, over time I could see there were a number of factors outside of my control when it came to sales, so it wasn’t entirely my fault.

Firstly, this was Chinatown and it became pretty clear, pretty quickly, that the Chinese customers didn’t want to be served by the white girl. They wanted to speak Cantonese or Mandarin or occasionally Shanghainese. I only knew a handful of words and phrases in Mandarin from school, definitely not enough to sell a camcorder. And as adorable as my Thai flag was and as proud as my boss was to have another language on her list, I think I had three Thai speaking customers that whole year. It was our Chinese customers who were the big spenders and they did not come to me. Fair enough.

Secondly, it also became clear that most customers were not comfortable buying expensive cameras from young women. This one pissed me off. I knew more about cameras than most of the staff, aside from a couple of the tech obsessed guys, but you couldn’t tell that by looking at me. I was no stranger to misogyny. I had spent the previous year working for a NGO on women’s sexual health and anti slavery initiatives. But to be constantly, blatantly dismissed by customers who preferred to be served by men, in my own supposedly progressive home city, really annoyed the crap out of me.

But the problem was also me. And eventually I realised why my sales were so much worse than everyone else’s. I refused to sell people what they didn’t want or need.

In terms of cameras, this meant I asked a lot of questions about what they were going to use it for, what kind of photography they were into and what they were likely to spend their holiday doing. I did not attempt to sell expensive and heavy SLRs to people who clearly wanted to travel light and come back with some lovely snaps for the memories. I did not sell additional, long lenses to people who were not going to need them (I knew how crap a long lens was unless you spent an absolute fortune on them) and I always told customers to avoid the compact cameras with the date stamp on, unless they were desperate for it because it ruined photos (the date function was usualy at least $50 more). In short, I matched the camera to the person, helped them avoid expensive, wasteful mistakes and told them what was worth the money and what wasn’t.

Bottom of the leaderboard.

I did sometimes watch the top salesmen at work (I wasn’t always run off my feet shall we say). I was fascinated how they did it. They were charismatic and charming. Customers genuinely enjoyed the experience. But I just couldn’t bring myself to do the upsell.

For a long time I thought this meant I was just bad at sales. I didn’t have it in me.

Fast forward a few years and I was an interiors and lifestyle photographer. My first agent Kate, was a total gem. It was in the 2000s when we still had physical portfolios that would be biked around the London to ad agencies and magazine offices. Whenever she could, Kate would set me up with in person meetings, booking a day of them back to back and I would schelp around town with my two enormously heavy portfolios meeting art directors and editors, one after another (much in the same way models do). Kate always told me that any opportunity to get me in front of someone she would take it because ‘if they meet you, they book you’. I assumed it was the same for all of her photographers but she told me one day that sometimes it was the opposite. Some were best met when they were doing what they did best, taking a picture. Not great at selling themselves.

This was interesting to me because at this point, I was still carrying around an invisible ‘worst salesgirl ever’ badge. I dismissed these as two different things and got on with life as a photographer.

A decade and a half later and I made a career pivot to writing and book coaching. I was a confident creative freelancer (I haven’t had a ‘job’ since I was 24) but running my own coaching business was going to be different to freelancing wasn’t it? I felt my persona as ‘worst salesgirl ever’ creeping up to haunt me.

It occurred to me then that perhaps I had been a bit unfair to myself all those years. I had written a book proposal which had interest from multiple agents and then had offers from multiple publishers (and even a pre-empt). And what is a book proposal if not a sales document? It’s a document that must answer every objection a publisher might have to investing money in the idea. It must passionately argue for why this book should exist. When I worked with writing clients, I could easily spot the sales problems in their book proposals. Who will care? Why is this urgent right now? What point are you trying to make? Why should I listen to what you have to say?

Sales.

I came to realise over time that I had not been bad at sales, not really. I had been effective at selling a customer exactly what they needed. I just wasn’t effective at selling high ticket items if they weren’t. While this did not serve me well in retail with a leaderboard hanging over me and competitive colleagues who loved the thrill of the sale, any sale, it had served me well in my career as a photographer, a writer and now a book coach.

I can’t sell just anything. But I can sell something I believe in. For writers, selling is a part of our job whether we want to admit it or not. Whether it’s pitching an editor for a commission on a freelance article, pitching a novel idea to our agent, writing a book proposal or reaching our readers through social media - it’s all sales. A lot of us have hang ups about hating sales, or being bad at it, or thinking it’s beneath us. It gives many of us the ick. But it’s a part of our work as writers, to help get our words out in to the world. And most writers I’ve worked with, with a bit of encouragement, know how to sell their ideas. They just have to tap into what drives them to pursue this work. Their why.

At the end of the year I spent working at the Duty Free shop I handed in my notice. I had been given the opportunity to spend my summer break from uni working in Thailand again for three months. My boss and I didn’t say it, but we knew I would not be coming to ask for my job back when I returned and we were both relieved. I was not the kind of salesgirl she needed. I would miss the other staff and pretending I was a travel agent but as I left for the last time (with a bottle of Allure perfume sealed into a clear plastic bag for my flight to Bangkok), I knew it was the right choice.

When I came back three months later, I got a new part time job which suited me much better. I could have long involved conversations with customers and they always left with something that made them happy. The owners had great feedback from regulars, who loved my recommendations. I had no problem upselling here. It was a family run place and I took on more and more responsibility. I even got involved in the buying and decision making. When I left to move to London at the end of my degree they were sad to see me go and I was sad to leave too. What had been the difference between this job and my first at the Duty Free shop?

It was a video store. I was selling stories. Best sales girl ever.