I once watched something on our store cameras that I still think about.
A guy walked into Supplement Giant with a simple question: "What's the best pre-workout you carry?"
The young employee helping him knew his stuff. He bought individual ingredients and mixed his own pre-workout, so he spent the next ten minutes explaining exactly how he did it.
The customer just wanted a good pre-workout, something he could throw a scoop of in a shaker before heading to the gym.
At one point the customer politely said it was going over his head. Our guy took that as a compliment and kept going. He nearly talked himself out of the sale. The customer did buy something in the end, but it wasn't really what he came in for.
I get where the kid was coming from. I had some of those same tendencies when I was younger. I thought walking someone through every detail of a product was good service. Sometimes it is. It took me years to learn when people want that much detail and when they don't.
I've hired plenty of people who lived in the gym, knew supplements cold, and were great with customers. I've hired others who cared more about showing what they knew than figuring out what the person in front of them needed.
A couple days later I sat down with the employee and talked it through. I told him the customer wasn't complimenting him when he said it was going over his head. He was politely asking him to stop. He didn't want to learn how to make his own pre-workout. He wanted someone who knew the products to help him pick one.
Then we talked through how he could have handled it and what to do next time.
Ryan Ragsdale is the CEO of Supplement Giant, a multi-location supplement retailer with stores across Colorado and Kansas. He grew up in the supplement industry and has spent over 30 years around supplements, including the last 18 running Supplement Giant.