My daughter is a newly-minted Girl Scout. In fact, her first official troop meeting is tomorrow, after school. She’s excited about Girl Scouts for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that she’ll get to sell cookies.

That’s right. She’s excited about selling Girl Scout cookies.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

My daughter is a force of nature. She Who Will Not Be Swayed. She focuses like a laser beam on whatever strikes her fancy du jour, and can withstand all efforts to divert her attentions – gale-force winds, a pack of sled dogs, 20 Mule Team Borax, you name it. Having been down this obssesion road once or twice before, I’ve learned that it’s like the tide – no use swimming against it. I’ve also learned that every now and then, I can use this obsession to try and give her a little real-world experience in things within my area of expertise, in this instance, sales and marketing. So let’s talk about marketing cookies.

The GSA (Girl Scouts of America, for those in the know) are huge on cookies. Get past the Nabisco Leviathan,  Keebler Elves and Mrs. Fields of the world, and the Girl Scouts have some mean mojo cookie-wise. (If you’d been selling cookies since 1917, you’d know a thing or two about it, too.) In fact, in 2006, the Girl Scouts sold over 200 million boxes. (That’s a LOT of cookies.) The organization has things down to a science. Mostly. We participated in (read: “stood out in the cold for a couple of hours to get our cases of cookies”) the “Cookies Now!” event here in Amarillo, the wind capital of Texas, if not the world. We picked up ten cases of cookies, for her to sell, essentially on spec. Now, you’ve got to look at this from the perspective of a 10-year-old. The world is her oyster. Every person she meets is a potential customer. In fact, she’s just this side of righteously indignant when they DON’T buy from her. (Don’t you wish every sales rep working for you had that attitude?) I went along as the Designated Parent, both because I dote on my kid, and because I was genuinely interested to get a look inside the World’s Largest Fund Raising-by-Cookie operation.

To start with, allow me to blaspheme by saying that, while I enjoy a Girl Scout cookie every year or so, I’m not sure what the obsession by so many people is about. I’m sure it has something to do with scarcity and the law of supply and demand, but seriously, guys – what’s the big deal?

Okay, having gotten that out of the way, it seems to me that there should have been some training for the girls involved, especially prior to them receiving their cookie supply. That may be a problem specific to my daughter’s troop, since she’s new, and her troop is a new one, too. After spending an hour in the cold wind (and both of us just recovering from stomach viruses (virii?)) we left with 10 cases of cookies (!) in my Jeep.

An online search revealed that we had 120 boxes of the Girl Scout’s Finest, at a retail price of $3.50 a box. Further research revealed that, although my daughter was excited about the prospect of selling cookies for selling’s sake, she was about to learn that there were many prizes within her grasp just for selling massive numbers of cookies! Yes! for just 2,000 boxes sold, she can earn her own Nintendo Wii! Lemme tell you, if she wasn’t motivated before (she was!), NOW she’s ready to set the world on fire. Like some animated chipmunk on Espresso Cola, she was ready to take on Amarillo, and sell, Sell, SELL! Cooler heads (mine) prevailed.

We elected to call our kindly parish priest, who kindly advised us to bring the cookie cache, kit and caboodle to church the next day, where she’d be more than welcome to peddle her cookie wares. She did, and bloody well cleaned up. In fact, she was able to sell off 1/4 of her inventory in a little under an hour. Not bad for a neophyte sales rep. Of course, She Who Must Not Be Swayed would not take “Yes” for an answer, nor was a 25% inventory reduction good enough for her. She wanted more! More, I tell you! So she took out her summer lemonade stand, crafted a new sign, and sat her little Alice B. Tookas on the sidewalk for an hour, freezing her fanny off, all in the name of selling more cookies. Her first lesson in sales came, then from the lesson of the low hanging (church crowd) fruit versus going after the glamorous, yet vastly more difficult market of the drive-by cookie purchaser.

We then had a little talk about accounting, and the importance of keeping up with all that cash and those checks. After a quick visit with Mr. Excel Spreadsheet, we’d devised a way for her to keep track of her sales, and create a list of buyers, all the better to create a database of existing customers for next year’s excursion into Retail SalesLand.

It will be interesting for me to see where this goes. And I’ll be sure to report any interesting results here, for your edification. I suspect that the troop will have some plans over the next couple of weeks for some group sales activities. I’m equally convinced that without some individual initiative on her part, selling 2,000 boxes to get that Wii she wants will be one of those “that’s the way the cookie crumbles” stories that always look less painful with a few years of hindsight under her Girl Scout sash.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 12th, 2009 at 1:35 am and is filed under marketing.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.