The Simple Trick That Sells Anything

0:00This episode is brought to you by CLA, with you on every step of your financial journey. To learn more, visit claconnect.com. From Entrepreneur Media, this is Problem Solvers, a show that solves entrepreneurs' toughest problems. I'm Jason Pfeiffer, Editor-in-Chief of Entrepreneur Magazine, and each week I take a problem that you're probably dealing with and get tactical solutions from people who have been there and solved that. So let's get solving. Jared Foster used to sell cheap watches at kiosks. Then he heard about two ladies who were selling a store called Times Ticking. It's in Utah. It's sold and repaired timepieces of real value.

0:41And Jared thought, hey, that could be a good business for me. We did a handshake deal. No money down. Just cash payments over five years. I thought I literally pulled the rabbit out of the hat. It was magic that this deal happened. The honeymoon was short-lived because although Jared loved this new business that he owned, he did not love how his inherited staff had been trained. Because they were very casual, the way that they approached their customers. And they would kind of talk to them from the chair almost. Now, to be clear, Jared hadn't come from a retail background himself, unless you count selling those watches at kiosks.

1:23So it's not like he had major retail experience to fall back on. But he just knew instinctively, this is not the right way to sell. I made changes immediately from the way that it was being operated. It was not popular. But very smart. Because what Jared did wasn't rocket science, but it was rooted in a real understanding of consumer psychology and what makes people comfortable and what makes them buy. And it'll make you think twice about every experience you've ever had walking into a retail shop. But before we get into that, some context here. So I'm speaking to Jared today because his company, Times Ticking, was included in a list that we published in September called America's Favorite Mom and Pop Shops.

2:10We identified 150 of the most beloved small local businesses in America. It is something that we do every year. We really love shining a light on these great local businesses. And that also means that we're devoting some episodes of problem solvers over the next couple months to the voices from this list. We want to hear from hyper-local entrepreneurs about how they succeed. Time's Ticking isn't technically actually hyper-local anymore. I mean, it still is. It has three locations in Utah. They are in Layton, Ogden, and Kaysville. But it also now has a heavy presence online, just does a ton of business online, and specializes in watch repairs, that everyone said was impossible.

2:53When we tell them that we can fix this timepiece for them, people get emotional, very emotional about this. Because these timepieces are often very expensive or have a lot of sentimental value, which means that Jared isn't really just in the watch business. He's in the people business, in understanding how to make people happy. But today we are going to zero in on that retail experience, how to drive more sales by engaging the customers that walk in. Remember a moment ago when I said Jared bought that store and then saw how the staff was treating customers and made a change that they all hated?

3:30Well, it gets very dramatic. You're going to have to stick around to the end of the episode to hear about that. But it all starts by rethinking the first thing that most salespeople say when they walk into a retail shop. Think about that for a second yourself. What do people tend to say to you? There is one question. You have heard it all the time for your entire life. And Jared says it's wrong. So what is the right question to ask? I change things up by saying, when the customer comes in, we're going to say hi to them immediately as they hit the floor. We're going to greet them with a smile as if we are happy that they've come into this store because essentially without them, we have no store.

4:16So we are very happy. we're then going to avoid the number one question that puts retail stores on the back foot from the very start now you can go across the country jason you can talk to retail stores at any level and i'm talking like national chains when you go in there i'll just ask you this what is the number one thing that they say to you as you walk in what do they say to you they say can i help you yep can help you find something and then what is the answer uh from me the answer is almost always no because i'm usually browsing unless it's a grocery store in which nobody's talking to me and i actually wish somebody would ask because i never know where anything is but yeah they always ask me can i help you and i don't always have an answer to that the answer that to that is always no i'm just lucky yeah that's yeah that's what i always say yeah okay so that's how it works number three is what is the follow-up to no I'm just looking what does the retail side say back to that uh they say some version of well let me know if I can help and then they just retreat to wherever they came from boom yeah so I realized that was happening and I decided that that question and just that question is a buzz kill so I avoided it at all costs and I started teaching that in our within our team there, then we're not going to ask this question anymore.

5:47It's pointless to ask this question. So let's do it different. And the way that we did that is we would say, oh, hi, welcome to Time Sticking. Have you been here before? There are only two answers to that. There is a yes or a no. Okay. Now when they say yes or no, we then have a follow-up that's exactly the same, whether they say yes or no, we say, well, welcome, welcome back. That's, um, hey, listen, um, let me show you this thing we have over here. We just got it. And we go and show them, we walk them over. Now you and I can't do this because we're on a podcast here, miles apart. Yeah. But if I was there with you, I could then turn and go.

6:34We call it. That's our thing. We called turn and go okay so you can turn and go and you can walk over to the area that you want to show and they will follow you 100 of the time because they're curious and they don't know you so they're being cordial yeah when you get it's also you're setting up an interesting i mean there's just something really interesting psychologically about what you're doing here which is that you're setting up a comfortable passive experience for someone when when someone is asked, can I help you? That can only be answered meaningfully by presenting some plan. I now have to have some specific intent for myself to be in this store.

7:17And I have to now lay it out for you the second that I came in, but I'm not that comfortable. I don't know if I want to be in this store. I'm not sure. Maybe I just, maybe I do have something, but I'm not going to tell you right now. And, uh, and so it puts people back on their foot. And the first thing that they do to just get out of it is to say, no, I'm just looking, right? But what you're doing is first, your question has incredibly low stakes. Have you been here before? The answer is yes. The answer is no. Like whatever, you know how to very easily answer it. You don't have to spend any time thinking about it.

7:43And you're not afraid of the consequences of the answer. Whether I say yes, or whether I say no, it doesn't seem like anything big is going to happen. And then the next thing is that you just invite them along. They're now just, they're in a slipstream here and they're going to just follow you. And it is a completely comfortable passive experience. The customer doesn't have to do or say or reveal or commit to anything. And so that is now making them comfortable. And it feels natural. So let's pretend, let's go back to the beginning. Hey, how are you? Welcome to Time's Taking. Have you been here before?

8:16No, I haven't. Oh, well, great. Welcome in. We're glad you're here. Hey, well, while you're here, let me show you this we just got it and we turn and go and to your point if you're at a grocery store and you've heard this before you're checking out and they say did you find everything okay well what if you say no like what are you gonna do about it i always wonder that like why are you asking me this do you have a solution to what you're saying i don't think so yeah no it's true at this point i am i'm checking out i'm done i'm done searching in fact i don't even know what would happen if I was supposed to add another item?

8:54What would I would feel like I would be doing a disservice to everyone behind me in line? No, you're right. That's actually the worst question to ask at the worst time. The time to ask it is to approach somebody like when they walk in. Well, I, you know, I actually, I'm not really sure what to do with the grocery store. When I walk into the grocery store, I have a list of things that I want. It is very intent driven visit. And I often have no idea where any of this stuff is. And I would love like a guide. yes if they had a situation through the middle maybe a table or so i don't know people a couple people that literally were there to say did you find everything okay you're still shopping so you're fine and you say no i can't find whatever the butter oh let me walk you over there i don't want them to tell me where it is i want them to go walk with me and get it with me right and then I'm happy.

9:42Yeah. So what is your tool? Bring them over to see. Okay. So we'll go back to turn and go. Now there's a bit of a setup here. You have to have five or four or five items in your store, whatever your store is that you're proud of, that you like. Okay. So we've already set that up a bit. Yeah. And so when we turn and go, we go to a case because remember we're in the timepiece business. So we're going to a watch case and we're standing in front of it. Now we have to show it to them. So while we're opening the case, it's time to build value to the brand. So we don't just stare at the case while there's complete silence and awkwardness.

10:25That would be weird. While we're opening it, we're going to talk about maybe the five things about this brand that we're really proud of. Because we assume that they come in, they didn't expect a turn and go. they didn't expect this to happen so now we're building up something they don't know anything really about yeah and you can see the level build as you go like for example i have this pen here it's just a pen i'm showing it to you yeah this is worth 50 cents maybe a dollar whatever well probably nowadays it's two but if i was to tell you that that pen was used to sign the Declaration of Independence and it's still just two dollars.

11:11Do you want it? I didn't change the price. I didn't change the pen at all. It is what it is, but I changed the story. Yeah. And the value changed because of the story. So you have to tell the story behind what you have. Because if you don't, the customer looks at that and says, that's just a two dollar pen. Why would I want that? So when we open the case, we're telling the story. Now when we get to the case and inside, we reach inside, we grab a timepiece, and we put it in front of the customer. Now, there is a bubble that everybody has where they're comfortable. So the more you know somebody, the closer they can get to you and you're not concerned at all.

12:02but when you don't really know anybody that bubble's kind of out there and if I was to put my hand with my timepiece near them obviously not too near but near enough that they take it out of my hand and they do it 100 % of the time they take it out of my hand and with sales Brian Tracy is one of the best at closing he has many techniques to closing made a video a long time ago about it It's still practical today. One of his sales approaches was the puppy dog's close. Meaning if you give someone the puppy dog, they're going to keep it. They just love it. Right. If you can get somebody to make physical contact with and some kind of physical bond with your product, they have a harder time walking away without it.

12:48Yeah. So that's all we do is we're giving it to them and we're putting it in their hands. And then we're looking for a reaction. My friend Vanessa Van Edwards, who studies human behavior, did a study looking at and tracking every single thing that happened in every single shark tank pitch and found a very similar thing to what you're saying, which is that if the entrepreneur got the sharks to touch their product, they were more likely to get a deal, which is a very interesting correlation. Yeah, absolutely. That's what we find. And so if they touch it, they might say things like, oh, how much is it?

13:29Well, that's a cue to us that now we're changing gears. We're not just showing anymore. Now we're selling. Right. They might say things like, does it come in any other colors? That's a cue. But they might just say, well, that's nice. And then, you know, they hand it back to you. And if that happens, well, we have different types of time pieces that go with different types of people in different types of scenarios. So now we can say one more while you're here. Let me show you this one. Turn and go. And then you do it all over again. So from a customer's point of view, it's such an interactive experience.

14:06It's hard to forget it. So something else that's happening inside of this that is kind of inherent in what you're saying, but I just want to make it explicit, is the language that you're using, I want to show you something, is very different from language that other people might use, some version of, I have something you might like. And the reason I don't like, I have something you might like, is for a couple reasons. Number one, because it makes an assumption. The person who is greeting you in the shop, they don't know you. And so they have no idea what you would like. So it feels weird for them to make some kind of assumption about what you might like.

14:45But then number two, it makes the customer immediately feel sold to. And now I have to keep a distance between myself and whatever it is that you're going to show me, because I don't want to create the assumption that I want this, at which point I am now in some kind of sale that I don't want. So you're drawing them in, but you're still maintaining that comfortable passivity, which allows them to be part of the experience. And it's magic. It works really well. And not only that it could work on every level of retail store that i've seen yeah even even something as simple as like my wife and i were walking by like a supplement store a couple weeks ago she made a comment about how you know it's a little bit stale yeah but you could pick up a bottle of anything in there and show it.

15:37Talk about it. Build value. It's going to work. And what you're saying by saying to somebody, let me show you what I think you'll like. You've just put up a lot of fences. And the same thing with saying, can I help you find something? You put up a fence immediately. What is the point of saying it? There is no point. Right. What have you found as a result of this process? I assume that you saw an increase in sales. But I'm curious if you also saw some interesting patterns. Like, for example, did you start selling more of whatever the first or second thing that the salesperson showed? Or did it just get people in the door and engaging and, you know, the sales were well distributed across everything in the shop?

16:26Well, we started doing this actually because people were coming in and having batteries done. Having batteries, like replacing batteries in the watches on the timepiece simple repairs like adjustments or whatever they take 10 15 20 minutes so people would sit there and stare at you right or like explain your job to you or whatever right so we almost did it as a way to uh free ourself from that and the customer's just sitting there looking around bored or they leave the store and come back right which is even worse which is a huge missed opportunity because these people are your ICP, right? Like if every business wants to figure out how to reach its ICP, its ideal customer profile, the person most likely to buy.

17:11And if somebody walks into your shop and all they planned was to get a battery repaired and spend very little money, well, you know, that's fine. But they have just revealed themselves to be a person who owns timepieces and who loves them and wants to keep them maintained. And that's exactly who you serve. So it would be crazy to have people who are your ideal customers show up and then to basically not engage them in anything more than the lowest value trend. Yeah, absolutely. So today we have, you know, 70 inch TV going with our YouTube channel rolling with videos that we teach people about timepieces and history of timepieces.

17:51They love it. And while we're showing these watches in the way that I explained, while we're doing a battery, so obviously there's two of us in the store, we started doing this and realized, wait a minute, we just sold a$500,$550 watch that they had no intention of buying. They came in for a battery. Yeah. And we just bumped our sale from a battery to a$550 bump. It was very awakening for us. We realized, okay, we're on to something huge here, you know. You know, Jared, it's interesting. You work in a luxury space or you're selling higher end products. And you have made this point a couple of times as we've been talking that this is a strategy that could scale anywhere.

18:38As you've been talking, I've been trying to think, have I ever encountered anybody else doing a version of this? And the only one I can think of, interestingly, was also in a very high-end environment, which was a retail gallery that I walked into in New Orleans. It looks like a museum, and it's stocked with museum things, antiques, and art from the Renaissance, and just insane stuff. It was incredible. And we walked in there, and it didn't happen immediately. Somebody didn't come in immediately, but also the place is set up like a museum. So you sort of start browsing naturally. But at some point, a woman came up to me, a woman named Deborah came up to me and just started showing me stuff.

19:18It's exactly what she did. She just started showing me stuff. She started walking around and, you know, she would see what we were interested in. And she would sometimes like lob a couple of things like, you know, do you love jewelry to my wife or something like that? And then, you know, off we go to the jewelry. And the next thing we know, my wife is putting on some$500, you know, not$500, 500 year old ring, which was a lot more than$500. And it was great. And you know what? I bought a$8 ,000, 6 ,000 year old rock out of that place because she was so engaging and because I found something that I was actually really fascinated by.

19:50And so this is a idea that exists, I think, inside of luxury spaces that people outside maybe don't think is relevant to them or haven't experienced or seen. But I think you just make an excellent point that I wanted to double down on that, that this really could live anywhere. I could walk into a t-shirt shop and somebody should immediately just start showing me the coolest t-shirts in there. Absolutely. And, and it to you. Once they're done telling it. Yes. and to your point my wife and i were in vegas a few years ago we stumbled on an art store in one of the malls one of the hallways and all of a sudden they started walking us through and and bringing us to pieces and then telling the story of this piece they were all done by the same artist we never heard of this guy and by the time we left that 20 minutes 30 minutes later I mean, we were completely sold.

20:46We felt like we found something special here. It changed everything because stories sell, facts tell. If you only tell the facts behind your product, you will get nowhere with your customers. But if you can tell the story behind the brand, bring it to life for them, people get very excited about it. They just do. Like you just said, your wife walked out with something she had no intention of buying. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I did. She was fascinated by all that jewelry, but didn't want to spend the money on a small object. Jared, final question. You'd mentioned earlier that it was difficult at the very beginning to shift the culture at your store when you first bought it because they were so casual.

21:31You had to introduce all these things. What happened as a result of that? I assume maybe some people were into it some people weren't but how did you make the change so that it worked well um yeah it wasn't popular because people were used to seeing that magic buzzkill question and going back like you said retreating yeah and sitting down and i was not about it i I was thinking we need to be actively helping people, showing. So as can happen in stores, a culture started up that was not positive about it. Obviously, the new guy's here. He's making us now get up, talk, whatever. Yeah. What's this about?

22:19So people decided to leave and they all left. Wow. I heard about it, though. I heard it was coming so what I did was I hired employees and I trained them in the food court without the current staff knowing oh my god yeah so I had them all ready to go and I knew that the current employees were going to be leaving and they did and we kept one though and that was a on purpose because we knew that he was the liaison between how this store actually runs and where we're at coming in you know pretty fresh we needed him to tie in those two he stayed with us but um yeah the day after christmas we had a whole new staff which was a brutal day to do that because that is the day after Christmas when people get new timepieces and want them sized.

23:24Right. It was a young mistake, basically. But that's the story. That's what happened. And we started over, essentially. With a new team and a new culture. With a new team that was fine with it. They were totally fine with getting up. They loved it. And they didn't know any different. It was perfect. Yeah. And you were off to the races from there. Jared Foster, this is so great. If people want to learn more about times ticking, what can they do? Well, we're on socials, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok. We have a big YouTube channel as well. You can find all that by visiting our website, timesticking.com.

24:01At the bottom, all of our social links are there. Our story is pretty cool. We've kind of grown organically, figured it out. And now we're behind a lot of momentum. So it's very exciting. and that can happen if you stay in the game long enough, you know? Yeah, that's awesome. Well, Jared, thank you so much. Yeah, thank you, Jason. It's nice chatting with you. And that's our episode. Now let's keep the conversation going. I write a newsletter called One Thing Better, where each week I offer one new way to be successful and satisfied and build a career or company you love. You can find it at onethingbetter.email.

24:45That's a web address. Just plug it into a browser. OneThingBetter.email. And if you get one of those emails and reply, it goes straight to my inbox and I will get back to you. Problem Solvers comes out every Monday morning. So make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss an episode. The show is produced by Emily Holmes and Money News Network. My name is Jason Pfeiffer. See you next week.