Short audio preview

Geoff Burch is the archetypal salesman. He's cheeky and fierce by turns. He's got a shaven head and stocky physique - features that he says make him look like an "escaped nightclub bouncer". And he dresses well. For the London Business Forum, he wore an immaculate pin-striped suit and pink silk tie... and, initially at least, sunglasses. He couldn't have looked any more sales-oriented if he had pulled up in a Porsche Carrera.

Burch began his speech by telling us of his expulsion from school for being a disruptive influence. "Where do you go from there?" he asked. "Alcoholism? Drug abuse? Living in the street, sleeping in a cardboard box?" He suggested that when you have no pride or morals left, there's only one place left to go: into sales.

Very few people still possess innate selling skills, he suggested. The sales part of most companies, Burch suggested, is like the wing of a Dodo: “a withered appendage.” Burch asserted that very few people have “intentional conversations.” “People that are nice to you won’t buy,” said Burch, building relationships is very good in theory but worthless if you don’t close a deal.

Yet Burch admitted the "always be closing" mentality has its drawbacks too. "As a savage, vicious salesman myself, I didn't really care too much about delivery," he said. "So, I would create purchases on promises and expectations that subsequently weren't delivered." The main effect of this attitude, he said, was that customers only bought from him once.

A key mistake made by business people today, Burch argued, is that they place too much emphasis on the link between customer satisfaction and repeat business. If you ask customers whether they are satisfied, and those customers tick off a list of things they find "satisfactory" about your business, you can easily be misled.

One of the fundamental problems in British business, he argued, is that we settle for being satisfactory when we should be trying to be remarkable. "When have you ever said to somebody, 'Hey, do you want to go to that new restaurant in town? I went there the other night with my wife and it was satisfactory.'"

Burch argued it is front-line staff who have the most important role to play in both earning loyalty and generating sales. Your aim should be to recruit front-line staff for both attitude and skill, he said. You have to make it clear what you expect of them. And, most importantly, you have to teach them basic sales skills, no matter what their job description may be. In practical terms, this means doing more than stating the obvious when they're dealing with customers. For example, why say simply that an item is in stock when you can ask leading questions such as: "Which colour would you prefer? Would you like me to hold it for you? Or, when would you like to come and pick it up?"

"The intention to sell should be in the back of [everyone's] mind," Burch concluded, it's something that comes instinctively to front-line staff in America much more than in the UK. His wife, he explained, orders Victoria’s Secret underwear over the phone and the sales people are so successful that what his wife intended to be a $50 sale ends up escalating to $300. “You have to realise that customers often want what you are selling, they just don’t want to pay for it,” said Burch. Customers need to feel that they are benefiting from a good deal too, “every penny they can squeeze out of you, is a penny won!”