Any business, including yours, can certainly turn its workforce into a sales force. All employees, whether it is a two-person team or a multinational company with more than 100,000 employees, are ultimately responsible for the sale. Every action, interaction and communication that an employee has with a customer influences their decision to buy from you or not. Customers are as influenced by the attitude of cleaners and delivery personnel as they are by senior management. The way your employees (in any department) answer the phone, write a letter, provide a service, or package a product for delivery leaves a lasting impression on the prospect's mind and persuades or deters them from a purchase decision .
Selling is not just the responsibility of your sales staff, it is the responsibility of all employees and starts with your attitude towards your customer. Let's start by turning your [workforce](https://www.cloudanalogy.com/ into a sales force by exploring two simple examples of good and bad attitude towards customers and their consequences. Both examples happened to me recently, and they summarize many of the principles you will learn in this book.
Example 1: The Barman - A bad customer attitude!
I am a huge fan of traditional British Sunday roast lunches and over the years have visited many pubs on Sundays for roast beef or lamb and a pint of beer. I think there is no better way to spend about an hour on a Sunday than to have a hearty roast dinner, complete with Yorkshire puddings, roast potatoes, piping hot fresh vegetables and a rich gravy. , all washed down with a pint of hot beer. I love this! That Sunday, my wife Jane and I decided to take our two children to the pub around the corner from where we live in Bath. This pub is a hangout for the Bath Rugby Club and has been around since the late 1700s. It is a wonderful pub with good beer. As we always do on these occasions, we order our food and drinks at the bar, tie the children up in their highchairs, and look forward to another pleasant treat. We had the restaurant to ourselves and were delighted when the food arrived promptly and was as good as we expected. But there was a problem with our lunch, just that the portions were too small. I thought the meals looked a bit small when they arrived, with just a slice of meat, some potatoes, and some veggies.
Being a self-proclaimed connoisseur of Sunday lunches, I have a good benchmark for measuring them. But it wasn't just me, the foodie, who thought the portions were small; my wife Jane (who eats little) also felt they were small, and we both agreed that paying the equivalent of a decent pair of shoes and always leaving hungry was mediocre value. When I was almost done with my meal and realized I was still hungry, I went to the kitchen to ask the chef for some more potatoes. The chef had just left, but the waiter (who had originally taken our order) showed up a few minutes later, I explained the small portions to him, and asked for some more roast potatoes. He looked at me like I was some kind of alien and said categorically 'no, the chef agreed on the portion sizes and that was it.' We're not talking about a completely new meal here, just a few potatoes, which I'm sure would have cost a few pennies. After a short but unhelpful conversation with the unhelpful bartender, I said that there was no way we would recommend this pub to others and that we wouldn't want to eat again. To which he turned and walked away, and for him, that was the end. Maybe that was the end for him, but now I would never recommend this pub for lunch (even though the beer is good), simply because of the small portions and poor value for money. In fact, I would purposely do the opposite and tell my friends to "stay away and don't eat there."
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