Barbara Bentley decided to bring 'selling' to the shop floors on I'm Running Sainsbury's. Hear her thoughts on if she thought people bought it...
[Laughs] I'm not today, no - you'll see it in the show though, I do wear it. Personally, I do wear it - not just in the store. I've got an eye for bargain, you know!
Well, it's not anything major. It was just I started with Sainsbury's on the 11th of October, I had three days of customer serving, and then I went in to meet the store manager - who didn't employ me, it was the deputy who hired me, so he didn't know he was going to get landed with me, did he! So I went to meet him and we had a long chat, and he thought, 'OK good, she's got a sales background'.
Sales and marketing. I never worked in retail; I used to be in insurance, building societies, that sort of thing - services rather than retail.
So, the first morning I said, 'Well, Tim…' - you saw a little bit of him on screen; he was really, really supportive and really sales-driven as well. I said to him, 'Well what would you like me to do?'. He said, 'You’re the store greeter, go out there and greet!' Literally like that - a blank canvas. I'd never worked in a store before, new face, new supermarket; you don’t know anybody, you don't know what you’re doing. So I thought, 'OK, I will!'.
So, I grabbed that short trolley - that was the start of it, because we were running a store promotion on Champagne in the busy period in the run up to Christmas - and I filled it with Champagne, because I was told that the beer, wine and spirits department the day before sold five cases of Champagne in the whole of the trading day. I thought, 'That’s one for me!'. So I loaded it with Champagne, went round saying to people, 'Have you seen this fantastic offer we’ve got?' - and we sold 20 cases that day. So I think that made people think,'Maybe we have got an idea here'.
Well I was called a store greeter because that's all they knew, but I’m now called store host, because I don't do the, 'Here’s a basket, have a nice day'. My job is two things: It's customer service and sales, which are intrinsically linked; so I’m offering a service, a personal service. So I smile at you, have eye contact, say, 'Did you know there's a fabulous offer on Olay?' or whatever it might be - 'No I didn’t and I use that' - 'Come on, I’ll show you where it is'. And if you buy it, you buy it, and if you don't, you don't - but at least I've told you it’s there.
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