Selling in Istanbul: the Egyptian Spice Bazaar

Istanbul: the History of Sales in a 5-Block Radius

Part 3 of 5: The Egyptian Spice Bazaar

The Egyptian Spice Bazaar, located near the historic district in Eminönü, is Istanbul’s second largest covered shopping complex. If you have a question or curiosity about spices, this is the place to be: The merchants know their stuff.

L-shaped with 88 vaulted rooms, you enter and exit under monumental stone gateway arches at either end of the hall. The east exit leads to the open piazza near the ferry boats and waterfront. The west exit dumps you into a myriad of busy shops and side streets, where locals do their shopping. The Spice Bazaar serves primarily tourists and visitors.

The bazaar was built in 1660 with Egyptian money and has remained in business ever since. It is the center of Istanbul’s spice trade; but in recent years product diversification has taken hold, which has resulted in specialty dilution. Aside from ancillary food items like nuts, candy, and caviar are stands of non-food products similar to what you’d see at the Grand Bazaar. As a visitor, I found the distractions of non-spice vendors a bit dispiriting.

I like the Spice Bazaar because of its differentiated look and feel from the Grand Bazaar, as well as the sales savvy of the spice merchants. Here you see and experience Turkish marketing smarts. Spice merchants are excellent at adding value to create differentiation, margin, and profit.

While stand-alone spices are commodity items, blends are not. The better merchants are experts at selling far more than just the featured ingredients of their unique blends. Their pitch is not built around the ingredients, but instead how the blend will improve your food and therefore your family’s dining experience.

The vibrant colors, sumptuous aromas, and bright lights of the Spice Bazaar are a celebratory haven for foodies from all over the world. The market does a brisk business but it is not combat shopping. Customers shuffle along, carefully inspecting the magic of culinary secrets. Interactions with vendors are one-on-one.

Tradesmen here are slick, quick, and assume the sale at first opportunity. Most will shovel a trowel of spice or scent under your nose and encourage you to take a taste. Samples come with rapid-fire talk tracks that showcase the vendor’s knowledge and expertise.

The vendor, not the customer, controls the pace and flow of the interaction. The better merchants are polite, quick, and respectfully courteous. Theirs is an interesting product: Everyone must eat but how we choose to reject or embrace their spices determines their financial success.

Both buyer and seller know that what we eat can taste good or bad, bland or rich, subtle or overpowered, memorable or forgettable, depending on raw materials, accents, and preparation methods.

Good food, perfectly spiced, accented for flavor, is a joy. The merchants will remind us of this. This visualization is at the heart of what they sell: accenting for excellence, especially with blends.

Hurrying the sales call along by controlling the pace of the interaction gains the merchant two important things: the chance to politely shovel into a clear plastic bag just a bit more of each spice than you may want or need, and the chance to quickly vacuum sealing your package—which sends an implied message of transferred ownership.

Americans will not push back—they will pay. The Turks know this and prove it with great efficiency.

7 elements of the successful vendor sale

This is the 7-step sales process the professional spice merchant orchestrates to manage the buying experience:

1. The hook. Engaging the customer. Pause to look and you will be professionally and politely engaged with good eye contact and a smile.
2. Create actionable interest. It is to the merchant’s advantage to engaging multiple customer senses (sight, smell, touch, and taste). This is how they sell blends and special teas. Primal sensory responses enhance customer desire.
3. Run a trotline for additional revenue opportunity. Skilled merchants do not argue or debate a No. They accept a No with a smile but follow that No with another decision you must make. If spices dead-end, it’s a seamless transition to teas. They will quickly and politely probe for any opportunity to grow the relationship sale. One item can turn into three or four very quickly.
4. Patiently explain the blends and other value-added, differentiated solutions. This step is what I (as a sales coach) loved watching so much. It is a joy to watch a professional shift from a commodity component discussion into a value-based, differentiated sale in so seamlessly the customer doesn’t feel it. Differentiated solutions sell for greater margin. The merchants know this and do it beautifully. From the customer point of view, the blends are magically distinct. You will fall for your favorites. They are clearly differentiated and hard to resist.
5. Relentless, polite, suggestive selling until the customer says “no” for good. All pro salespeople respect skilled up-sellers. The merchants know how to maximize a sale. They also know when to stop, button up the deal, and take the cash. They do a wonderful job of managing the emotional experience of the buyer in a way that leaves the door open for repeat business.
6. Polite, respectful, and swift closing of the transaction. Weights are measured, calculations estimated on the fly. You can pause and challenge the math if you want or pick this point to haggle. This is the merchant’s test of trust: He has acted in an honorable way—will you do the same? Spices are individually vacuum-sealed, labeled, bagged, and handed over.
7. Handshake and thank-you goodbye. The customer experience is ended with respect, leaving the door open to future business. In a margin business like the spice trade, relationships are worth a lot of money.

In the Spice Bazaar, the emotional engagement of the customer is key. When a customer walks away feeling respected, having been fully engaged and learned quite a bit, wondering how the heck he spent so much on something he’d walk right past in the supermarket back home is quickly forgotten.

Turkish coffee

Turkish coffee is a method of preparation, not a brand or bean. Roasted and then finely ground coffee beans are boiled in a pot with sugar and served in a cup where the grounds are allowed to settle. This method, invented by the Turks, is regionally popular. It is found in the Middle East, North Africa, the Caucasus area between the Black and Caspian Seas, and the Balkans. Turkish coffee is a unique process that features its own taste, froth, aroma, and presentation.

The coffee is strong and served in small cups, and then left to stand for a short time after serving to allow the grounds to settle at the bottom of the cup, which they do: like mud.

After drinking, the sludge-like grounds can be useful. The cup is turned over atop the saucer to cool and, once cooled, the patterns of coffee grounds can be used for a method of fortune telling known as tasseography.

A popular everyday beverage, Turkish coffee is also part of the traditional Turkish wedding custom. As a prologue to marriage, the bridegroom and his parental figures must visit the young girl’s family to ask for the hand of the bride-to-be and the blessings of her parents.

The bride-to-be must prepare and serve Turkish coffee to the guests. For the groom’s coffee, she sometimes uses salt instead of sugar to gauge his character. If the bridegroom drinks his coffee without sign of displeasure, the bride-to-be assumes he is good-tempered and patient and will be a good husband.

Sometimes, however, the salt is not an etiquette test. Sometimes it’s a message from the girl that she’d rather wait for another suitor.

Buy it like a native

To see what a brisk Turkish business looks like, check out the video clip from Istanbul’s most famous Turkish coffee vendor: Kurukahveci Mehmet Efendi Mahdumları, located near the Grand Bazaar. Believe it or not, this is pretty much what it looks like all day long: people trading bills for measured bags of bundled Turkish coffee.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ae0_W-Xo-b4

 

Of all my stops in Istanbul spent watching sales methodologies, the Spice Bazaar was one of my favorites. The ability of the merchants to demonstrate how to sell value in a commodity backdrop was fascinating. The fact that they’ve been doing it under that roof for going on five centuries now is testament to the wisdom of the approach.

 

Tomorrow:

Part 4 of 5

Istanbul’s Best Sales Practices