OK, maybe it wasn't this big, but it was big for us. We usually do this every spring. It's good to get space in the garage again to do the little things (like park the cars in it).
There were lots of little sales lessons for me during the four hour extraveganza...
- I found myself having to prove that a vacuum cleaner we were asking $5 for actually worked. Our customers wanted us to plug it in to show them that it worked. "The nerve!," I thought as I tried to find an outlet in our garage. I plugged it in. I flipped the switch. It sucked (as in "the dirt" not as in "why it was in a garage sale") but the little brush wheel wouldn't spin. Our customers looked at me like I was pulling a fast one on them. With a little jiggling of the bar, it started spinning and sucking. For joy! We sold a vacuum. But it took a live demonstration to close the deal. The lesson I learned is that when you can prove something works well, that's usually enough to make the sale...so why don't more sales professionals give some kind of working testimonial or demo on every sales call?
- Pricing a product at a yard sale is completely without reason. A complicated mechanical device like a vacuum was $5, but a cross-stiched picture of a blue barn was $4??? That's only $1 less than a VACUUM for crying out loud! The lesson I learned is that pricing a product sometimes becomes emotional for the seller, which is not necessarily a good thing. The picture didn't sell, probably because it was priced too high. But don't tell that to the gorgeous, hard working super mom who priced the picture that had sentimental value. If you're selling in the real world, don't become emotionally attached to your product to the point where it warps your view of what pricing should be.
- Up until a few hours ago, we owned a semi-working vacuum, a picture of a blue barn, about 50 ceramic figurines, clothes of every shape, size and color, broken toys, stacks of unread books, half used tubes of lipstick, and about 1.3 billion other things. The lesson I learned was that we buy a lot of stuff based on emotion. I know its not based on logic, so it's got to be based on emotion. And somewhere, a saleperson or marketing pro came up with a story that we liked and bought into, and we purchased their crap. Good job on the salesperson's part, bad on ours probably. But it's worth pointing out that we humans buy things based on how we think it will make us feel vs. need. Nothing wrong with that if you've got the resources to spend on that kind of stuff, but also a useful lesson in buying motives for all you sales professionals out there to sit up and take notice of.
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