Icebreaking & Customer Connection | IQOS Brand Ambassadors at Public

In this workshop, IQOS brand ambassadors stationed at Public stores worked through a structured programme designed to transform the way they initiate and hold conversations with customers. The focus was not on product knowledge; they already had that. It was on the human moment before the pitch: how to make contact, build genuine rapport, and guide a stranger toward curiosity and trust.

the ambassadors who left this workshop did not just have better tools. They had a clearer sense of what they were actually there to do and the confidence to do it without a script telling them how.

What we achieved

Moving from an anonymous seller to a memorable person. There is a version of retail training that teaches scripts. This was not that workshop. The first and most important shift we worked toward was identity: the difference between being another person behind a stand and being someone the customer actually remembers. Something as simple as introducing yourself by name, genuinely, not mechanically, changes the entire dynamic of the interaction. It removes anonymity. It makes it harder for the customer to walk away from. Participants left understanding that presence is a skill, and that it can be practised deliberately.

Finding common ground before finding a reason to sell. The instinct in retail is to move toward the product as quickly as possible. This workshop pushed in the opposite direction. Participants developed the ability to find genuine points of connection with a customer, an interest, an observation, a shared reference before any mention of IQOS entered the conversation. That sequence matters. People buy from people they feel understood by. The common ground is not a delay on the way to the sale. It is the foundation of it.

|Building the bridge with confidence, not pressure. Moving a customer from casual conversation to genuine interest in a product requires a specific kind of confidence, not pushiness, but conviction. Participants worked through the language and timing of that transition: how to carry the energy of the conversation naturally toward the stand, how to frame IQOS not as something being sold but as something worth discovering. The difference in how that moment lands on a customer is significant. This workshop made participants fluent in it.

Making the customer say yes before asking anything. The most effective moment of persuasion in any sales conversation is the one the customer does not notice. Participants explored how to lead a conversation in a direction where agreement feels natural rather than pressured, where the customer has already said yes to curiosity, yes to interest, yes to the person in front of them, long before a formal question is asked. That sequence, when done well, does not feel like selling. It feels like a conversation that went somewhere worth going.

Adapting to who is actually in front of you. No two customers are the same, and no single script survives contact with a real person. A significant part of this workshop was devoted to reading the customer — understanding whether they are a smoker or a non-smoker, alone or with a partner, in a hurry or browsing — and adjusting approach accordingly. Participants left not with a fixed set of lines but with a flexible, responsive way of engaging that holds up across the full variety of people who walk through a Public store on any given day.