04 Jan An Expert Salesperson Who Was Nuts About Retail?

When I answered the phone that day, it was Roger. I hadn’t heard from Roger for several months. He had worked for me as a Salesperson at a building supply store I had managed. I was always excited to hear from Roger. He had retired a few years earlier, but we had kept in touch and he would occasionally call me to offer some sales advice or update me on his gold panning and home renovations at both his and his son’s houses, along with the status of the cabin he was building. As I drove down the highway, I asked Roger how he was doing and waited to hear what little gem he had for me this time. The phone was silent for a few seconds and then he told me “I have cancer and its not good”.

I was in shock and pulled over to the side of the road. Wholeheartedly expecting to hear a different answer, all I could say was “WHAT!?”. He told me again, he had cancer and it was terminal. Stunned, I listened to Roger talk. He had not been feeling well and shortly before he and his wife were leaving to attend a wedding in another city, he told his wife about the sharp and constant pain he was feeling. They decided the trip was off and Roger was going to the hospital. At that point, he was tested and diagnosed with cancer, and it was spreading fast.

Roger continued talking and the conversation quickly became about work; the people we worked with, where they were now and how much fun we had. He spoke about the acquisition of our private company by a corporate company. Roger was very passionate about what he saw as the demise of a strong, local, family owned operation, as he was once a business owner himself.

We also talked about selling. Selling was Roger’s passion. When you hear the phrase “he could sell ice to an Eskimo” that was Roger, except Roger could upsell a refrigerator, water, an ice dispenser, gloves and moccasins… and if you by chance needed a baby seal, he would not only find it, but also sell you a 2×4 8 foot piece of lumber, charge 2.00 to cut it into four pieces, add on a quart of stain, a screwdriver, a few galvanized spiral spikes, a hammer, a brush and a sheet of plastic. That was how Roger sold. He only wanted to see you back in the store to say thank you and to start a new project. Roger knew it was inefficient to make multiple trips and a pain in the ass to stop and start projects. He would also never ask about the seal… he was honorable that way.

I remember one time when a vendor had come in to our store to do a reset of the nuts & bolts aisle. To Roger, the nuts & bolts aisle was his church and he was the preacher, who just happened to have a direct line to the hardware Gods. You could come in and tell Roger what piece of furniture you were fixing and Roger would take you to the exact fastener in under 10 seconds. If you only needed one, he would sell you ten, because “you might as well change them all at once, have a couple of spares and not have to make another trip”.

I knew when the vendor arrived with his planograms for the new layout, because Roger escorted him to my office, like a teacher hauling a kid to the Principal’s office. Roger had identified a few spots in the planogram that to him, were going to be a problem… the start, the finish and everything in between.

After a heated, but respectful conversation, Roger pleaded his case as to how the reset was not logical in the eyes of the customer. Long story short, Roger was 100% correct. The layout looked good to a vendor whose primary interest was to present more products at higher margin and have an arrangement that made it easy for him to order from weekly. Roger knew however, it would confuse and frustrate our customers, decrease our sales and increase the labor on the stores behalf. Regardless, the vendor completed the reset as it was drawn out, and in the end, Roger would reset the reset to what made sense to the customer, meant less footsteps for the employees and what would generate more sales for the store. It’s hard to argue with common sense and profit. Both the vendor and I, silently and separately, agreed to leave the “new and improved” set up alone.

You see, for as good as a sales person that Roger was, he was even better at looking after his customer. He had many regular customers that would come in and not only ask for him by name, but if he was busy, they would happily wait in line. A lot of times his customers would send their friends in to see him, and when Roger took care of his customers friends, well… they began sending in their friends. By the time Roger had retired he was a maven in the building supply business. He attended as many training sessions as he could and many times he would take over the training, especially when it came to tools. He was an experienced carpenter with an eye for perfection and he would share that expertise every chance he got, with customers and staff alike.

There are many more stories I could share about Roger, from our outdoor “clearance” sales, to secretly shipping clearance items from other stores at ½ cost to sell at full price in our store, to tracking lost inventory and preventing theft in our stores, but what’s most important about Roger was he showed up for work every day, and he truly gave a shit about the people he worked with and the people he served. Financially, Roger was more than comfortable. His family was grown up and on their own paths, his wife had a lucrative career and he just wanted a place to come to work where he enjoyed the company and got to do something he loved – SELL! If he wasn’t content on “sticking it to the man”, he probably would have showed up for free.

I tried calling Roger a few weeks after he told me of his illness, but by then he was heavily medicated and too exhausted to talk. Shortly after, he passed away peacefully, with his family at his side. When he called me on the road that day it was partly to share his sad news personally, but it was also to say thank you. He recalled his times at the store as being the best in his working career. The comradery with staff and customers, the pot luck lunches, evening meetings, inventories, our mini-Olympics and our practical jokes. He enjoyed the fact that all of us had perfected our tasks and routines. Collectively, we cared about serving our customers and serving each other. We took pride in our ability to look after the details ourselves. If you looked to your left or your right, somebody was there to help you. All too willingly. We had become a group of leaders who were essentially leaderless.

I have a book in my library (and by library, I mean somewhere in my house) called “It’s Your Ship: Management Techniques from the Best Damn Ship in the Navy” by Captain D. Michael Abrashoff. If you haven’t read it, I recommend the read. It was given to me by a company employee when I was in my second year of Personnel Development Training at our building supply company. I don’t think that person knew it officially, but I referred to that book as my bible in my first year of Managing a store. The person who gave me that book – was Roger. The irony of him calling me to say thank you confuses me to this day.

Many companies will point to online shopping as the great disruptor of the brick and mortar business, but over the years as competition increases, prices become lower, margins get tighter and markets saturate themselves to the point of cannibalization, it has been the frontend personnel that have paid the price. Online shopping simply brings the package to your door, but great people bring customers into your store. It’s those same people that will “sell ice to an Eskimo” and much, much more. One day the customers may stop coming, and corporations and business owners will come to realize that it was their bottom line that cost them their front line, that cost them their business. Roger that.