This time next week I’ll be in Mehico. Can’t wait.
Last time I went long haul was to Bali – which as well as great surf and sun had a diving shop called ‘Scuba Dooby Doo’. (That’s the kind of copy genius I aspire to.)
Bali has great salesmen too. Hundreds of them. You can’t go more than twenty seconds – thirty if you dawdle – without someone trying to sell you something.
And they’re bloody good at it. Hardly surprising, I suppose – after all, they’re all selling the same tat to the same people, so they need to be brilliant to survive. Plus, since they try their sales technique on about 200 people a day, they’ve plenty of opportunity to hone their skills.
So, you want to be a results-driven marketeer? Follow the Bali shopkeepers’ lead:
1. Smile. That’s how, in ‘AIDA’ terms, they get your attention. With a 100 megawatt megasmile using teeth unstained by Costa extra shot cappuccinos.
In fact, everyone’s so smiley, it’s a culture shock when you arrive back in a grey and drizzling Heathrow several weeks later. In Bali you get so used to smiling at strangers, you forget that’s the kind of behaviour that gets you arrested / assaulted in England.
Anyway: smiling. Very effective. Does your marketing begin by making your prospect smile? Now that I think of it, some of my favourite ads of recent months (like the Old Spice ‘The man your man could smell like’) do exactly that.
2. Relationship building. You walk past the same place more than once and they’ll recognise you. Say hello. Ask you where you’re from, how long you’re here for, where you’re planning on going. There’s no hard sell either, it’s always just, ‘Oh please, just have a look around, take your time, no problem’.
They put more effort into establishing a little rapport with their customers in five minutes than many brands do in five years.
3. Exclusivity. Like I said, everyone’s selling the same stuff. Yet the number of times I showed interest in something, only for it to turn out I’d made a very astute choice, picking something particularly fine and rare (therefore costing a little bit more) was extraordinary.
So I’m flattered to have made a good decision. And I don’t want to miss out on something exclusive.
4. Action. Nothing has a price on it. Because no price is fixed. Bartering is part of the whole experience. Again, there’s headology at work. Once you’ve started haggling, you don’t want to miss out (like people who are determined to win an eBay bidding war, and end up paying over the odds).
Plus, when you do agree a price, you feel like you got a bargain. Even though the price was simply inflated in the first place so they could then discount it (a bit like a DFS sofa sale).
5. Recommendation. Shopkeepers recommend restaurants, restaurants recommend shops or trip organisers. And it’s amazing how a testimonial of any kind – even one from a stranger who you suspect is getting a back-hander from the place they send you to – still convinces.
Then you get a free aperitif with your meal when you mention the shopkeeper’s name and you really do feel special and like you’ve found a really good place. So you spend twice as much.
6. Perseverance. Oh. My. God. Sit on the wrong part of the beach and you’ll be mobbed by people selling sunglasses or slices of melon or massages. They don’t give up easily. And if you’re seen showing interest in a pair of ‘Ray Bun’ sunglasses, every seller within 200 yards will descend to show you their Prarda, Guchi or Ohkley sunglasses.
Always polite, always smiley: but when it comes to the crunch they do push for that sale.
So there you go: six simple selling tips from the streets of Bali.
Of course, the final lesson I learned was that while bead bracelets might look ok on a man when you’ve got a tan and you’re on a beach in Bali, those same bracelets make you look like a right dick if you keep them on when you’re back in England.
Although I’m sure that won’t be the case with the ‘I love Cancun’ sombrero I’m bound to pick up in Mexico.
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