Elizabeth Hamilton

October 6, 2014

Sales Associates Professional or Unprofessional

Throughout my life I have met countless examples of professional and unprofessional sales associates who either gained my trust, respect and admiration or irritated and angered me to the point of discontinuing the sale. In the essay I will first describe my most memorable experience with a salesperson that was positive and made me feel comfortable, and then an experience with a salesperson that was unpleasant and made me feel uncomfortable.
One of the most pleasant experiences I had was when I got my bicycle. I wanted to pick the best one, yet had limited budget, therefore, I had many uncertainties as to what kind of tires, or breaks to pick, let alone what frame I needed (e.g. mountain bike or plain city bike, hard tail or soft tail, etc.). With all these uncertainties in head I could not pick the bike online, so I visited the local shop to get the feel and touch and to actually pick something up. The sales assistant was a true professional in his field, who made by experience extremely pleasant by alleviating all the fears and removing all my uncertainties. He did not even ask me how often I was planning to use the bike (as I was not 100% sure about that either), he simply enquired about my other athletic activities, hobbies, and lifestyle. Then he told me that statistically speaking people who had a lifestyle such as mine will best enjoy city bike as it contained all the right features. He explained me the pros and cons of different types of breaks, hard-tail/soft-tail, size and width of tires and basically told me that those do not really matter for a lifestyle bicycle rider, yet they do play an important role when I am to compete in bicycle races, mountain expeditions, etc. and can give that extra edge to a professional rider to beat another professional rider. He concluded that statistically speaking people forget all the concerns and worries that they had when they tried to make an important buying decisions (such as buying a car, bike, or even a house) and started to love it anyways, so as long as I pick the bicycle now that I really liked, I was likely enjoy it, since virtually all city bikes had all the features that I need or may need. He also noted that, although he does not make such offers to everyone, but if I did not like the bike I could return it to him within 1 month! That was an extremely generous proposition to me and it seemed risk-free, so I opted for it and I never regretted.
As for the most unpleasant shopping experience, I remember one when I tried to book a trip to Florida for the holidays and wanted to have an unforgettable time. To include, a hotel, a transfer, as well as numerous excursions and sightseeing opportunities in my trip I contacted one of the local travel agencies. I booked an appointment, when I arrived I had to wait 10 minutes. When I was told it would take only 5 minutes, because the manager somehow did not manage to finish what she planned to finish. While waiting, a receptionist offered me some tea, yet ultimately brought me coffee, because they ran out of tea, so she thought I would take coffee. The sales manager certainly fit into the overall corporate culture I had already began to experience, and started off with “what’s your budget for the trip?” question. Somehow expectedly, she said that it was an extremely low budget and that I would not get anything good for this money elsewhere, but she would try to help me. First she made several offers, then they said “oh, no, that’s too