Zensō
Major Contributor
I’ve been through this same scenario. I agree that high end audio can sometimes look like an addiction, requiring the same willful ignorance and cognitive dissonance, while providing the all important dopamine hit.
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Is it possible to be honest and a successful Hi-Fi salesperson?
- Thread starter Purité Audio
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thecheapseats
Addicted to Fun and Learning
yes - far more interesting... at the micro level - it's a study in human nature...
I'd like to think that if he were alive at this time - Mark Twain would be a member of ASR...
thecheapseats
Addicted to Fun and Learning
at the top top end of the nutty-money equipment pyramid... yes...
just asking? ->there must be a newer euphemism for "hi-fi salesperson"... someone here must know...
dshreter
Addicted to Fun and Learning
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There are many shops that moved their focus to home theater and integration. The buildout of spaces with good acoustics and delivering a system that sounds good and is easy to operate is not trivial.
I do think it would be very difficult to operate an honest business focused solely on hifi components but there is room for some middle ground. You can’t argue that a Rolex is more accurate than a Casio, but it’s not necessarily misguided to buy or dishonest to sell a fine watch.
I see the audio industry similarly. Listening to high fidelity music is a luxury, so it makes sense to purchase with similar objectives as other luxury items - craftsmanship, aesthetics, and the overall experience of owning the item. You don’t have to betray your customers to sell on those terms.
I do think it would be very difficult to operate an honest business focused solely on hifi components but there is room for some middle ground. You can’t argue that a Rolex is more accurate than a Casio, but it’s not necessarily misguided to buy or dishonest to sell a fine watch.
I see the audio industry similarly. Listening to high fidelity music is a luxury, so it makes sense to purchase with similar objectives as other luxury items - craftsmanship, aesthetics, and the overall experience of owning the item. You don’t have to betray your customers to sell on those terms.
OP
- Thread Starter
- #26
Just idle curiosity, what is the first question the owner asks you when you enter?
Keith
Keith
I would humbly and warmly greet them. I asked if I can direct them anywhere or if they have any questions or I simply would walk up and put in a CD and play it if they where looking at gear and let them have ago at the gear until they have questions and then I take the reigns and start open and closed probes, affirming, qualifying and commence with amps all sound about the same and speakers are the big priority (as a example) and so we might need to adjust your ideas a bit and if you let me prove it to you you will see this is the best way. etc etc. It works good for mid fi stores. (I consider up to about $5000 for a pair of speakers at the time mid-fi because the hifi gear was wayy more.)
DSJR
Master Contributor
I knew Howard too. depends which side of the coin you were...
In the 80's, I was 'successful' because the agencies we had were popular, we 'all' belonged to the club back then which shall be naimless and we really didn't need to 'sell' anything to anyone apart from upgrading the cartridge or an amp upgrade - you know the score if you were in the UK back then..... I'd dem away for hours when my manager could sell a two and a half grand B&O system in less than half an hour including writing the invoice and booking the installation!
I took a sales course that B&O ran in 1995! Not especially pro them as a brand, but I have to say it seriously opened my mind a bit as to how to ask pertinent questions, how to steer the client to products that met his needs (in a positive way) and how to close and finish the sale properly (something I was embarrassed to do properly before). Sure, put me in a commission based furniture sales room and I'd have bloody starved, so I was really lucky to be honest. The final years of my full time sales career was turbo charged compared to before, as I and the now more mature customers could have fun together picking and choosing the systems they ended up with but always with the prospect of a sale at the end of it all. I found I was more able to work out the tyre-kickers or people just collecting data for a future purchase and again, I could enjoy the experience of showing them what we had and the possibilities on offer - many of these people returned later to buy, so time not wasted...
The above was my life and I'm having trouble fully breaking away from it right now although the retail based ties have progressively severed over the last twenty years. Now I'm back to being like most of 'you lot' and actually daunted at venturing into my local audio salon as they know full well I can't afford the audio confectionary they present to their well-off retired clientele and I usually get a kind of 'Look what the cat's dragged in' kind of greeting, hopefully meant in jest but still...
DSJR
Master Contributor
I'm too long out of it, but there is a way of gently greeting the client without intimidation or the usual 'How may I help you?' type of introduction
OP
- Thread Starter
- #30
I only ask because a couple I know always ask first ‘what is the budget ’ and if the budget is say more than a pair of say Kii Three then they won’t even show those speakers to the customer even though they are probably ( almost certainly ) better than the traditional passive set-up which costs more which he is going to demonstrate.
Another kitchen table valve amp manufacturer used to adjust his prices according to the customers car.
What about cables a recent customer of mine wanted to buy active speakers he almost settled on ATC sales guy started on the expensive dac/cables will be absolutely necessary to get the best out of them tack.
Keith
Another kitchen table valve amp manufacturer used to adjust his prices according to the customers car.
What about cables a recent customer of mine wanted to buy active speakers he almost settled on ATC sales guy started on the expensive dac/cables will be absolutely necessary to get the best out of them tack.
Keith
OP
- Thread Starter
- #31
Without wishing to speak ill of the dead I experienced the very angry salesman side of Howard well after Subjective had gone he was back working from home I asked him for some advice ( this was years before PA) and he did bring some amps to my place, when I decided not to buy I saw a side of him I hadn’t experienced before very disappointing.
Keith
As a consumer, sometimes when I said my budget is only $500, it doesn’t mean I have only $500 in my pocket. It means: please break my budget and give me the reason.
There are many ways to define a good salesman. Certainly at the most basic, the salesperson must be able to sell, but in my role in the custom install part of this industry I have met some amazingly successful salesmen in terms of annual sales. That said, I define a good salesman as one who listens to the client and helps the client get the system that best suits their needs.
I have met some of the sleazy type who can sell snow to eskimos, verge on the criminal, and will say anything to maximize the sale and close the deal. But I have also had the pleasure of working with some salespeople who are extremely ethical and sell only what the client needs. The ethical salespeople can be equally successful, but unfortunately they are less common than the folks who care more about their commission than the clients' needs.
Yes, it was sacrilege to use that phrase. Hehe. Lots of firm discussions about that helping stuff went on. I found most days for about 8 years (The last year of 9 years I was burned out.) I was really beaming and happy to be with customers and in the environment and was joking and greeting customers without even helping them and then after giving them some time as it was a big 3 level store with a huge CD/record/cassette department with awesome deals bringing in a massive volume of people that walked down the stairs and right through the home audio department where I worked. So there where many demos that went nowhere and I filled the free time doing demos between buying customers. With my propensity for doing demos to just entertain people I had a huge amount of repeat customers and people that came back months or years later and wanted to speak to me. Being very friendly, happy and humble worked for me. It also helped that the staff liked me and referred customers to me all the time.I'm too long out of it, but there is a way of gently greeting the client without intimidation or the usual 'How may I help you?' type of introduction
I was surprised in my last round of auditions how two of the four dealers attempted to sort of ’dis’ me, ie suggest I might not have enough money to get something really good, claim they didn’t have time to waste on casual shoppers, etc. In fairness, the one deepest into audio woo was much better on that front.
Perhaps there was an issue because I was upfront with them: I had owned Thiels and a space-heater Adcom amp for over 20 years and been basically happy with them; my experiments with other amps and DACs in past years hadn’t yielded any huge revelations, and I was looking for a similar long-term happy listening experience.
Perhaps there was an issue because I was upfront with them: I had owned Thiels and a space-heater Adcom amp for over 20 years and been basically happy with them; my experiments with other amps and DACs in past years hadn’t yielded any huge revelations, and I was looking for a similar long-term happy listening experience.
Hi
The subject could easily be extended to salesperson in general. At times the customers/clients are their worst enemies: They come with a mindset and expect to hear certain things from the salesperson. A person who comes to a High End Audio store comes often with the "everything makes a difference" mindset. You sway them at your own peril/lack-of-sales. Slight exposure to High End Audio Forums will convince you of that. on top of that cables/accessories, are where the money is , even for non-HEA stores. That is where the salesperson and the store make their largest margins
Same with many other areas of sales. If you are in Corporate IT, do try to sway a customer away from a Cisco network component. Go ahead, try! You may find yourself in a position where the customer becomes the mouthpiece of that company and, the risks of losing not only sales but job, increase tenfold. Salesperson then reverts to safe mode, and sing whatever songs the customer wants to listen to...
Conclusion: Possible but more difficult than one would imagine, and that for several markets.
Peace.
The subject could easily be extended to salesperson in general. At times the customers/clients are their worst enemies: They come with a mindset and expect to hear certain things from the salesperson. A person who comes to a High End Audio store comes often with the "everything makes a difference" mindset. You sway them at your own peril/lack-of-sales. Slight exposure to High End Audio Forums will convince you of that. on top of that cables/accessories, are where the money is , even for non-HEA stores. That is where the salesperson and the store make their largest margins
Same with many other areas of sales. If you are in Corporate IT, do try to sway a customer away from a Cisco network component. Go ahead, try! You may find yourself in a position where the customer becomes the mouthpiece of that company and, the risks of losing not only sales but job, increase tenfold. Salesperson then reverts to safe mode, and sing whatever songs the customer wants to listen to...
Conclusion: Possible but more difficult than one would imagine, and that for several markets.
Peace.
In my own business (investment management) I don’t want clients who don’t understand what I do and why it works - including the many things I don’t know and can’t predict. Because clients who don’t understand what you do pull their money out at the absolute worst time, whereas that’s the time that the clients who get it offer you more. And that helps your track record. The best formula for long-term success is to improve the ratio of good to less-good clients.
However, sometimes my sales people are visibly uncomfortable when I say “I don’t know” and agree to all the (temporary) bad things that happen, as well as all the incredible opportunities, when markets panic.
But that is, perhaps, the nature of a business where better performance definitionally requires you disagree with the majority and be proven correct. In audio, there is a pretty clear truth to what works and what doesn’t, and it doesn’t matter what other people believe.
However, sometimes my sales people are visibly uncomfortable when I say “I don’t know” and agree to all the (temporary) bad things that happen, as well as all the incredible opportunities, when markets panic.
But that is, perhaps, the nature of a business where better performance definitionally requires you disagree with the majority and be proven correct. In audio, there is a pretty clear truth to what works and what doesn’t, and it doesn’t matter what other people believe.
Hatto
Active Member
You can be very successful, but not THE MOST successful I reckon.
ferrellms
Senior Member
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A top salesman I knew personally (not hifi) was proudest of the fact that he could "mark" a customer immediately. These people can make a lot of money.
Keith_W
Master Contributor
How is it possible to be an honest salesman of anything? Your job as a salesman is to get sales. All of them diminish the faults of their product and exaggerate the benefits. They don't draw your attention to the dodgy aspects of the warranty, or where the manufacturer could have cut costs.
A Tesla salesman is there to sell you a Tesla. If he was being honest, he would tell you that a Chinese electric car is much cheaper. Maybe tell you about rare earth mining using child labour. And that you only recoup the carbon cost after 100,000km of driving. I suppose none of this is dishonest, if you think that not divulging information that might go against the sale is dishonest.
What do you think of this sales pitch for the Merging Clock? Remember, Merging are a pro audio company and many of their customers are no-nonsense objectivist types. The Merging Clock is pitched towards the audiophile market. This is their sales blurb: "Clocking of digital audio signals is vitally important to achieve the best possible fidelity. Merging’s experience in dealing with the challenges of perfectly synchronizing digital devices is invaluable. The RAVENNA network technology makes it much easier to distribute super-accurate timing information to all connected devices, but why not go a stage further and make your Master Clock phenomenally accurate."
All of this might be true. But notice they did not actually say that it improves performance of your DAC. I have no doubt that the Clock itself is "phenomenally accurate", nor do I have reason to believe that the specs they quote might be untrue. But the crucial information that they left out is: clocks work best when situated as close to the DAC as possible. Large distances, particularly with jitter-inducing cables, will degrade the performance of the clock. What is the actual improvement in performance of the DAC if you were to add a clock to your system? Are there measurable differences at the DAC output? And even if there are, are these within range of audibility?
A Tesla salesman is there to sell you a Tesla. If he was being honest, he would tell you that a Chinese electric car is much cheaper. Maybe tell you about rare earth mining using child labour. And that you only recoup the carbon cost after 100,000km of driving. I suppose none of this is dishonest, if you think that not divulging information that might go against the sale is dishonest.
What do you think of this sales pitch for the Merging Clock? Remember, Merging are a pro audio company and many of their customers are no-nonsense objectivist types. The Merging Clock is pitched towards the audiophile market. This is their sales blurb: "Clocking of digital audio signals is vitally important to achieve the best possible fidelity. Merging’s experience in dealing with the challenges of perfectly synchronizing digital devices is invaluable. The RAVENNA network technology makes it much easier to distribute super-accurate timing information to all connected devices, but why not go a stage further and make your Master Clock phenomenally accurate."
All of this might be true. But notice they did not actually say that it improves performance of your DAC. I have no doubt that the Clock itself is "phenomenally accurate", nor do I have reason to believe that the specs they quote might be untrue. But the crucial information that they left out is: clocks work best when situated as close to the DAC as possible. Large distances, particularly with jitter-inducing cables, will degrade the performance of the clock. What is the actual improvement in performance of the DAC if you were to add a clock to your system? Are there measurable differences at the DAC output? And even if there are, are these within range of audibility?
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