Look Into My Eyes...You Are Spending More Money...

People with lots of experience in sales can probably identify with this post.

After having dealt with so many people at a fast food counter over a long period of time, I've developed the ability to pick up on who is more likely to be an easy touch for an upsell on their combo size. 

There are certain signs in a customer's behavior and choice of words that indicate to me who would more likely agree to an upsize when pitched. I also have discovered that when I use a certain choice of words in a certain order, with a certain tone of voice, an upsell is almost guaranteed. I'm not going to reveal here what these things are, because I consider that information to be proprietary to my success on the job.

This evening I had a typical case. A guy with his wife and kids ordered their food, and were trying to order as cheaply as possible. When I noticed that, my sadistic streak kicked in and I worked my magic.  Sure enough, what would have been a $10 sale ended up being more than $25.

As the family left the counter, I overheard the wife whisper to her hubby "how on earth did we just order $25 worth!?" He told her not to worry about it, just eat it and be quiet.

Heh-heh-heh.

Of course, this is all a hold-over from my days as a failed advertising sales executive. I spent a lot of money on courses in Sales Hypnosis and Neuro Linguistic Programming.  I may have really sucked as an ad salesman, but I can really work 'em over at the burger counter.

For those of you who are curious, here's what I CAN tell you: read the following book, available at Amazon, and you'll understand what I'm talking about:


I put links to the pages where these books are sold.  

Many people scoff after reading them. That's ok. Maybe next time they wonder why they paid $25 for couple of burgers, they'll know why.

Lawyers from Hell.

If you're illegally downloading music, and the record companies want to sue you, apparently even your own death won't protect you. I've heard of persistent lawyers, but this takes the cake.

Read about it here. [link]

Corporate Buzz Word For Today.

"EXPOSURE"

A long list of big names in European banking have had to admit they suffered huges losses from the collapse of a Ponzi scheme perpetrated by ex-Wall Street tycoon Bernard Madoff. All told, losses aroung the world from banks affected by the scam number in the hundreds of billions.

Read about it at Yahoo News [link]

All throughout the above article, spokespeople for these companies continually referred to their losses as "exposure."

"Shares in Santander Bank [of Spain] plunged after the lender said it had an 'exposure' of more than three billion dollars to Madoff Investment Securities..."

Here's something that I find interesting. When large European blue-blood banks loose multiple billions of dollars because of some hot-shot phony on Wall Street, the proper word for such a debacle is not "exposure." The proper description for that kind of disaster should be more like "We walked out of the office, pulled our pants all the way down, displayed our assets to women on the sidewalk, and completely humiliated ourselves."

Heh. "Exposure." What a laugh.