Modeling the Way

I remember in my retail sales experience having many instances of people modeling what they expected of me.

That seems to be the way that retail sales work.

Watch.

Learn.

Repeat.

Monkey See, Monkey Do.

I can recall at my first job at American Eagle upon returning from my two-year church mission that we had to get people to sign up for credit cards.

That was the big deal.

Credit cards.

You could sell 500 pairs of jeans to 500 different people, but if they didn't put it on their American Eagle Credit Card it was almost worthless in the corporate mindset.

We were a good store.

We had fun and we liked each other a lot. (Almost to a freaky, uncommon level for retail)

We even sold well!  Rarely, if ever, did we not make goals for sales.  But we constantly fell short in terms of Credit Cards.

Even the management wasn't stellar.  They were better than most of us regular employees, but they weren't swinging for the fences by any means.

And then there was Nathalie.

Nathalie was amazing at getting people to sign up for credit cards.  I don't know how she did it (TO THIS DAY) but she was always the top sales person each month, and she had the most credit cards!

Now, before any wild accusations are made, yes, she was an attractive girl.  But not overly attractive to the point where she could use her looks to get people to do things.  She also wasn't that shallow that she would stoop to such a level.

She was just really, really good at what she did.

So the managers would stick us with her.  We would watch, try to keep track of what we saw, and then usually fail horribly when we tried to repeat it.

By the time we all left American Eagle I think most of us had a pretty good idea of how to get people to sign up for cards.  So much so that we weren't one of the worst stores anymore!  We weren't the best, but we were further from the worst than when we started.  And that is the definition of progress!

And it was all thanks to Nathalie and her patience in modeling how we should be doing it.