Position, Permission, Probe: The Secret Sales Voodoo of Apple Store Employees

You've seen them. Those aloof 30-somethings adorned in black T-shirts, just hanging out, or casually chatting up some customer by the Nano section. Apple store employees often get a bad rap for being gadabouts or even worse, inattentive, but it's all part of a studied sales strategy says Alex Frankel, author of the forthcoming book Punching In: The Unauthorized Adventures of a Frontline Employee. A strategy that works.

Apple 2.0's Philip Elmer-DeWitt points to a couple brief excerpts from Frankel's new book as a prime example of why the company's retail stores are so effective at moving merchanise. After spending two years working undercover in entry-level jobs -- including one at Apple -- Frankel walked away with a few key insights into what fuels the stores' retail engines:

Once on staff, I learned the difference between a gigahertz and a gigabyte, but more important, I saw that, like the iPod’s user interface, training of Apple Store employees has been carefully designed. A series of podcasts I listened to and watched showed that selling was all about the approach. I shadowed other workers as they executed the company’s three-step sales process. They explained to customers that they had some questions to understand their needs, got permission to fire away, and then kept digging to ascertain which products would be best. Position, permission, probe.

All this sets the employee's on-the-job attitude. At an Apple Store, workers don't seem to be selling (or working) too hard, just hanging out and dispensing information. And that moves a ridiculous amount of goods: Apple employees help sell $4,000 worth of product per square foot per month. When employees become sharers of information, instead of sellers of products, customers respond.

Photo: MacGeek Pro