My father taught me a little bit about what it takes to make sales in a competitive market. He was good at sales, whether it was trading airplanes, farm machinery, vehicles, feed, or other farm supplies. He succeeded in a small town environment in the days before Internet sales and FedEx deliveries. My professional life didn’t involve making deals for retail sales, but many of the principles he taught me helped with building church budgets, fundraising for nonprofits, and other aspects of the work I did. I am grateful that I was able to learn about business and life from his examples. Here are some lessons I learned.

Focus on what the customer wants and needs. Long term success is not about what I want to sell, but what the customer wants to buy. Snake oil salesmen try to convince customers that they want or need something that gives them no benefit. They have bottles that they need to sell. Don’t get stuck with product that your customers don’t need.

Be fair and be honest. Customers don’t mind profit. They do mind getting gouged. There was a Hutterite colony that purchased nearly all of their farm supplies and equipment from my father because he would show them his invoices and tell them how much markup he was making to cover overhead and modest profit. They didn’t mind paying their fair share, but they didn’t want to overpay. He often said that it is bad business to overcharge and making too much on a sale will “come back to bite you in the end.”

Think long term. When trading in a used piece of machinery, consider who the customer for that item might be. A series of deals can allow for trimming margin in one sale in order to complete multiple sales.

Maintain a reasonable inventory. If you don’t have what the customer wants, they will go to another place to make their purchase. Unsold inventory becomes more expensive with the passage of time.

Of course, my father did business in a different time. He ran his repair shop and parts businesses to support sales. These days most dealerships run those departments as separate entities with profits dedicated to that department.

I was thinking about my father and his way of doing business recently as I was cleaning out old email and text messages from my devices. Every day I receive advertisements for products that I don’t want or need. I regularly look at items on retail sales sites that I have no intention of purchasing. I might be looking to see what is available for someone else. I might be interested in something that I will never purchase. I might be trying to solve a problem and doing a bit of random searching to see what is available. Whatever the process, the algorithms that determine which ads pop up on my computer and land in my in box seem to be way off. I am constantly receiving pitches that make me think, “Just because you want to sell it doesn’t mean I want to buy it.”

I may not be a typical customer. I’ll browse through a seed catalogue looking at the pictures of plants that grow in different climatic zones than mine. I don’t intend to purchase those items. Sometimes I just enjoy looking at gorgeous pictures. Sometimes I enjoy thinking about how far particular fruits and vegetables have to travel to get to our grocery store. In a similar way I will look at all kinds of products on the Internet that I have no intention of purchasing. I am not currently shopping for a new car, but I’ll still walk around the sales lot when my car is in the shop for service. One of my favorite ploys is to ask a salesperson, “How long do you think this car will last?” When they tell me, I say, “Oh good! That means the one I have doesn’t need to be replaced.” It amuses me even if it doesn’t make an impression on the salesperson.

I have found it useful to use the Internet to check inventory at a store. I can enter my preferred store in a hardware chain site and it will display if a particular item is in stock. A similar feature allows me to check inventory and prices at other stores, including the big box stores. After a bit of Internet shopping, I can make a decision and go to a single store to make the purchase. I’ve discovered that a local hardware store often has lower prices on items that I need. This week when all of the stores are selling lots of RV antifreeze, the best price by about 15% was a small local hardware store. As a bonus it is closer to my home so I didn’t have to drive to the big box store.

Another thing that distinguishes me from some other shoppers is that I like to see and touch an item before I purchase it. I do buy things sight unseen from the Internet on occasion. Still, I prefer to go to a store to make a purchase. The big online bookseller now has a feature where you can see the first few pages of a book online, but that is not at all the same experience as flipping through a book from the liner notes and author bio, scanning the contents, looking at a few footnotes and getting a flavor not only of how it begins, but what it is like in the middle. I will often go to the bookstore in search of a specific title and end up seeing other books that interest me. More than once I’ve decided to forego the book that brought me to the store and purchase one that was next to it on the shelf.

Customer service still matters a great deal to me. Being able to find a clerk in a store that can answer questions and will take time for me is a rare experience, but one I remember. Sometimes I get treated the way my father treated his customers. When that happens, I’m likely to become a repeat customer.