Sales Tip: The grocery bag tactic

Way back in my Klein Tools (1979) days as a district manager (salesman), we were introducing a line of really top-notch metal hand toolboxes. For the first week or so, I had almost no luck selling them to my distributors. After a lot of “No thank yous,” I realized that I was walking in the door of my customers carrying a bright red metal toolbox instead of my normal sample case. In reality, what I was doing was making my distributors surmise that I was going to try to sell them toolboxes and giving them lots of time to come up with a reason why they didn’t want to stock toolboxes.

Finally, I started carrying the box into my sales calls inside a plain old brown grocery shopping bag. With this tactic, I was able to explain that we were introducing a new product that they were not selling, yet all of their customers used it. This worked perfectly, and we placed a lot of toolbox displays in my electrical distributors’ showrooms.

The same is true for you. If you walk into a customer location openly carrying a new tool of any kind, you take away your opportunity to make a great feature, advantage, benefit, close presentation. In plain words, you’re letting the cat out of the bag before you want to.