“Deepak, you got paid. Here’s your check,” Cindy said in a matter-of-fact tone and gave me an envelope. To her, it was just another check, but this was my first salary check in America, my first check that wasn’t in rupees, my first check that had a dollar sign before the amount. I thought of my family and friends in India. I knew my parents would be happy and proud of me. I didn’t show my excitement to my colleagues, slipped the envelope in pocket, and continued checking items off the inventory list as I went through the shipment. But I couldn’t take my mind off it. I got into the bathroom and tore open the envelope. I was having déjà vu.
When I looked at the check, I immediately converted the dollar amount into rupees. To my surprise, the amount was actually lower than what I had made in my last job in India. It hit me, once again, that I had quit my job in India and had come to the United States. Why? The question haunted me. Not only was the check was pathetic, but also I had less than a month to keep this job.
I still wasn’t sure how I could learn to be a better salesman in the time remaining in my thirty days of probation. To avoid the embarrassment of not being able to answer customers’ questions, I kept unboxing the products in the backroom, and dusting and straightening the shelves. It made me look busy. Ron and Jackie didn’t mind. I got the feeling that they actually liked what I was doing. I was doing them a favor by saving them the monotony of putting items on shelves. They were happy greeting the customers, answering their questions, pitching new items, and making sales. I knew that the only way to make more money was to do what Ron and Jackie were doing. I desperately needed to spend time on the sales floor.
I decided I had to stop being afraid of people. I put on a happy face and greeted every customer who walked in. I tried to engage them in conversation, asking them how their day was going, and telling them who I was and where I came from before I helped them with what they came looking for. This didn’t work all the time, but my new friendliness was effective with a lot of customers. It also helped that not every customer needed help. Half of them had done their research and knew exactly what they wanted. My job was to just ring them up. Because I had been so disappointed with my check, I tried to ring every customer who came in.
I was getting over my fear of talking with the customers, but after two weeks Cindy brought me a sheet of paper and said, “Deepak, your sales have improved, but your dollar per ticket is very low.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that you are ringing too many people. That’s okay, but you should try to sell them high-dollar items, too. That can help boost up your sales and the dollar per ticket. Awright?”
Not everyone came in looking for a five-hundred dollar TV, a thousand dollar projector, or an expensive laptop. The majority of customers purchased items under twenty dollars. Ron, Jackie, and Cindy were good at selling cell phones, but that required knowledge and experience. To sell a customer a two-year service plan and a cell phone, one needed a lot of confidence, which I didn’t have at this point. Selling a cell phone was just as complicated as dealing with a customer who came to return one. I saw my colleagues looking frustrated at the mere sight of someone walking through the door with a cell phone box. The store and the employee both took a massive hit on their performance if a cell phone came back. Sometimes we couldn’t recover from the plunge in numbers, even after the end of the day. When someone came in looking for a cell phone plan, I happily ushered him or her in Jackie’s direction. I knew I was losing money by doing this, but I was just not ready to handle that kind of transaction.
I wondered what high-dollar items I could sell. There were lots of items in the store: televisions, boom boxes, satellite radios, computers, DVD players, cameras. But I didn’t know how to sell a TV to someone who had only come in to buy a ten dollar ethernet cable. How do you convince a customer to spend twenty times more money than he or she wanted? I had no idea, but I had no option but to try.
On a Monday morning, a little after ten, when I was in the store with Cindy in the backroom, a middle-aged woman walked in. She looked at me and said, “Is your last name Chopra?” and laughed. I smiled and said no. It made me happy that she knew the famous author Deepak Chopra.
“What part of India are you from?”
I was happily surprised that she could guess I was from India, and that she hadn’t assumed I was from the Middle East.
“You know India?”
“Oh, yeah, I love India. A few years ago I was in Rishikesh for a month. I was learning yoga.”
“I am so happy to hear this. I’m from Lucknow. Have you heard of it?”
“You know, I’ve actually passed through Lucknow on my way to Varanasi from New Delhi. If I remember correctly, my train stopped at the station for thirty minutes.” She smiled.
I couldn’t believe my ears. She knew India, she knew Rishikesh, and she had learn yoga. She said she had spent half an hour in Lucknow. I almost cried from gaiety. I told her she had to go to Lucknow next time. I described to her what Lucknow looked like, its history, weather, people, culture, and kebabs. I talked so passionately about my hometown, mostly because I missed it so much, that she and I both forgot what we were there for. And then, I realized I was supposed to be the salesman.
“I am sorry, I’m talking too much. What can I help you with today?”
“Oh, not at all. It’s fascinating stuff. I want to go back to India.”
“You should, yes.”
“I am looking for a portable DVD player. You guys have one?” My eyes lit up. We had portable DVD players in stock and they were a high-dollar item. I brought a few different kinds for her and she chose the most expensive one. It was two hundred dollars. Trying to hide my excitement, I rang it up, but just before I hit the total button, I mustered up the courage to bring up the camera.
“Would you be interested in a digital camera today? This one has 3.2 megapixels,” I said.
“You know what,” she stopped for a moment and then said, “I have been meaning to buy one for a long time. Go ahead and ring it up.” I looked at her in astonishment. I couldn’t believe that just my mentioning the camera had been enough for her to say yes. I scanned the camera box and the total jumped to more than five hundred dollars. It was an amazing sight. She grabbed the plastic bag with her stuff in it and thanked me for helping her.
“And thanks for the great conversation,” she said, just before she left the store. I thanked her and brought up the screen on the computer to look at my numbers. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. $528 it said. She had been the first person in the store that day. My dollar per ticket was 528—at least for that moment. The money on the screen was not the money I had made, but it was more satisfying than the paltry sum on my salary check. It was a confirmation, a reassurance, a glimmer of hope.
I reflected on my conversation with the woman and realized that I had been able to sell her the camera not because I possessed great knowledge about the product, or because I had several years of experience in sales. I had been able to sell it because I talked with passion and no fear in my mind. I had forgotten that I was a salesman and conversed with her as I would have done with someone in a coffee shop, on a street, or at home.
I needed to do that again. I couldn’t be Jackie, Cindy, or Ron. I couldn’t know what they knew. I couldn’t sound like them and couldn’t look like them. But, I could be myself, be Indian, be a foreigner, be a man who’d just landed in the country, be Deepak. I decided I needed to connect with the customers on a personal level.
Later in the month, all the employees had to be at a store meeting at nine on a Saturday morning. Cindy had a few sheets of paper in one hand and large of cup of Starbucks coffee in the other.
“We need to order more cameras. They are flying off the shelf. Deepak, what are you doing? How are you able to sell so many cameras?” she said. Ron and Jackie looked at me. I was a little surprised that she had brought that up first thing in the meeting.
“I don’t know. I just ask them if they would be interested in a camera. Most of the time they say no, but sometimes they want to buy it.”
“Awesome, Deepak,” said Cindy with a big grin. “That’s great. Keep it up. You’ve become the king of digital cameras.” Digital cameras had become my favorite things to sell. They were packed in boxes, stacked up on the counter, ready to go. Most of the information you needed was right on the box, and there was not much to learn. Point and shoot. And, they weren’t cheap. They cost somewhere between two hundred and three hundred dollars.
After the meeting Ron came to me and said, “Whatchu do with the cameras? Whaddya tell the customers?” I knew he wanted to know how I sold, but I didn’t know what to tell him. I told him the same thing that I had said to Cindy: I asked customers if they wanted to buy one. He didn’t think it was that easy. There was something else to the story, he knew. He watched from the corner of his eyes when I talked to the customers.
When a customer walked in, I didn’t say the standard salesman greeting: What can I help you with today? Most of the time, they had a ready answer for that question: Just looking. They wanted to be left alone. Instead I asked them a question about something they had on them—a book, a shirt with a message, a bracelet, their hairdo, or a tattoo. They didn’t expect a salesman in an electronics store to be interested in what they were wearing. I surprised them, and more often than not, they were happy that I was showing interest in something that was personal to them. Once I had their attention, I was able to start some sort of conversation. The camera was the last thing I talked about. I always talked about the person. I felt manipulative in some way, but often I was genuinely interested in customers. It was an opportunity for me to socialize with Americans.