By Chris Bucholtz

I just returned from a 15 day trip to Egypt and Turkey. I jokingly referred to it as a CRM fact-finding mission, which my wife found grating, but I did find some vendors in Egypt who were putting CRM ideas to work – especially the idea of doing business the way the customer wants to do business.

If you’ve ever been to the Middle East, you’ve experienced haggling – the back-and-forth negotiation of price commonly conducted in markets for every kind of product you can imagine. For folks from the U.S. approaching this with the right attitude, this can be fun the first couple of times, but most of us grow weary at what is essentially competitive purchasing – you versus the merchant. For small items, when you’re dickering over three or four Egyptian pounds, the price involved is actually 50 or 60 cents. When you realize this, the investment in time and energy hardly seems worth it. And when you’re doing it in 108-degree heat, it’s almost impossible to justify.

(Before anyone mentions the immediately-apparent stupidity of visiting in Cairo in June, let me say I went to see my niece graduate from high school. She’s one down from the top on the far right of the photo on her school website. Her dad’s in the foreign service, and as much as I’d have preferred the graduation to take place in December, or for the family to be re-assigned to Tahiti or Spain, those things were not going to happen.)

However, in Maadi, the merchants have hit upon something. The shops on one street in this Cairo suburb sell largely to ex-pats, embassy people, oil company families and the like. Instead of dragging in the sales process used everywhere else in the country (jumping on the customer the minute he walks in, hanging over his shoulder until he indicates interest in some item, then engaging in haggling over a price), the vendors have learned to sell the way their customers want to buy. They provide help, but no pressure, and their prices are fixed – and fair.

It’s no surprise that my brother-in-law has bought six rugs from the same rug shop; Ahmed, the guy who runs the place, is relaxed, willing to roll out as many carpets as the customer wants, and lets the customer take her time with a decision. My wife had the poor guy roll out about 50 rugs before she picked out one – which is what she would have done in the U.S. He gave her a price, then quickly computed what it was in U.S. dollars without waiting to be asked. After she paid, he gave her the lowdown on the rug’s pedigree, the way it was made and what to look for in similar rugs.

Another place down the street has been the source of many of our Christmas gifts from the family. It carries handicrafts, jewelry, paper products, simple textiles and so on, and if it weren’t for the omission of a handrail on the marble steps into the shop (only an issue during infrequent rain) the shop could be in the U.S. Again, the customers are allowed to shop, are given fixed prices and pay on the way out – a familiar process to westerners, and one that makes them more likely to buy.

Ahmed at the rug shop admitted that this approach was less stressful on him that negotiating every sale, and I have to think that it makes bookkeeping a lot easier, too. But from a CRM perspective, it’s a great example of tailoring your sales approach to the customer. The customer wants to buy the way he wants to buy; the seller needs to sell the way the customer wants, too.