Your Number Will Soon Be Up in Girl Scout Cookie Sale

Sorry, girls, but in today’s world, you’ve got to have more than just a melting smile and a winsome ponytail to sell Thin Mints and Tagalongs and Trefoil shortbreads. It takes perseverance, salesmanship, accounting--and a telephone.

For selling is serious business, and Girl Scouts of the USA is bound and determined to turn out accomplished sales representatives. The wares are the same, but the tools have changed.

For the first time in the Los Angeles Basin, the Girl Scout Council is teaching its oldest green-clad charges to function as sophisticated telemarketers, transforming their dens into baked-goods boiler rooms and themselves into silken-voiced saleswomen.

In San Diego County, girls have been encouraged for the past five years to telephone friends and relatives in order to sell cookies. But they have yet to reach out and touch strangers, as Los Angeles Scouts are being groomed to do.

Tips, straight from the Girl Scout manual, include: “Save your telephone sales cards. They will become valuable references for next year and following years.” And: “Careful selection of words and your tone of voice must generate the image of someone that people trust.”

It’s too soon to tell how many members of the Angeles Girl Scout Council will heed that advice and start selling over the phone, Scout officials said. But the practice could give the girls, ages 13 to 18, a new tool to replace the one they invariably lose as they grow older.

“The older girls have the feeling that people don’t want to buy from them,” said Billy Vanderpool, a board member and cookie sales trainer for the Angeles Council. “They’re not cute little girls. And, also, it’s embarrassing to go out in your uniform when you’re 16. And this gets the girls more involved in the business aspects so they can apply it to their own career future.”

Hawking Samoas and Golden Yangels and Do-Si-Dos still supplies most of the money that keeps the 78-year-old organization afloat. But growing health and safety concerns and changes in the American family have caused the group’s 333 regional councils to turn to increasingly sophisticated marketing techniques in addition to the traditional door-to-door sales.

Consider:

Since the mid-1980s, Girl Scouts have been specially trained for confrontations with the nutritionally correct. They are armed with written pitches provided by the companies licensed to bake for the group, and they are skilled, as these manuals say, at “turning negatives into positives.”

A neighbor says cookies are bad for the health? If the Scout is on her toes, she’ll answer: “Our cookies contain no preservatives and no artificial colors and are made with 100% vegetable shortening.”

And she’ll tell that naysayer that Trefoil shortbreads have only 30 calories each, that the chocolate chip cookies are rich in fiber, low in fat, sweetened with real fruit juice and have 25% less sodium.

The San Gorgonio Girl Scout Council instituted an 800 number in 1989, so potential customers could place their orders directly at the group’s headquarters in Colton. Older Girl Scouts packaged the cookies for delivery by United Parcel Service.

The result of this and a few additional modifications? A 28% surge in orders, the biggest percentage increase for any council in the nation.

“We want everyone who wants Girl Scout cookies to get them,” said Vern Woodlies, director of fund development for the San Gorgonio group. “With both parents working, it’s not possible to have all the girls do door-to-door sales.”

The Girl Scout Council of Greater New York has found that it pays to know the market. As a result, the group takes cookie orders in February but does not deliver the wares until late April or early May.

“We have to take Passover into consideration in the New York market,” Kathy Gallo, the group’s spokeswoman, said. “(Many Jews cannot) have Girl Scout cookies in the house, so we wait until the holiday’s over. Our delivery date is always contingent on when Passover is.”

To keep up with rising prices, Girl Scout cookies are getting more expensive. Although the sweets can be found for as little as $1.75 in some areas, they sell for $2.75 a box in others. Prices are set by the 333 separate councils to reflect concerns such as delivery costs in different parts of the country.

The 10 councils in Southern California--along with groups that serve the greater New York, Atlanta, and Columbus, Ga., areas--raised the cookie price this year to $2.50 from $2. For Southern California, it is the first price hike in nine years.

Girl Scout councils throughout the country began experimenting with telemarketing three years ago with mixed results, and the Angeles Council is the first in the Southland to push organized telephone sales.

In Orange, San Diego and Imperial counties, girls have been encouraged for the last five years to telephone friends and relatives in order to sell cookies. But they have yet to reach out and touch strangers.

A 1989 survey of Scouts in San Diego and Imperial counties found that they sold about 50% of their cookies to friends, relatives and neighbors, a market that was easily accessible by telephone.

Pat Sunda, a Girl Scout service unit coordinator in North San Diego County, says her Escondido-based troop of 14-year-old girls started experimenting with telephone cookie sales two years ago.

Now, however, safety concerns have boosted the telephone’s role in younger Scouts’ cookie sales as well.

“It started out for the older girls, but we’re adapting it for the younger girls,” Sunda said. “It’s just become more hazardous to go door to door--you never know who’s going to be on the other side.”

“The technique of just going around and knocking on doors is seen by parents as being potentially dangerous and unproductive,” said Cece Sander, director of product sales for the Orange County Girl Scout Council. “So we do encourage telephone sales . . . to friends and neighbors. The more we keep children away from people they don’t know, the more we like it.”

Three years ago, the Northwest Georgia Girl Scout Council, which serves the Atlanta area, had its first “cookie seminar” to introduce a telemarketing program. The strategy was dreamed up by the Girl Scouts of the USA and its cookie licensees.

Angela Fuller, one of the area’s top cookie sellers, saw the benefits immediately. When the 15-year-old from Acworth, Ga. was “a little girl,” she said, she could sell between 300 and 500 boxes by knocking on doors, manning cookie booths in her community and roping in her parents for assistance.

Then she turned 13 and found the telephone. Like any seasoned telemarketer, Angela relies heavily on a good customer list--the membership directory of the Mars Hill Presbyterian Church and her family’s address book.

“There’s about 300 members in my church,” she says. “I get in contact with all of them, plus about 50 family members. I’m the only kid in my family and my parents work late, so I have the phone all to myself. . . . I try to leave two weeks where I have no homework at all. I sit down from about 3:45 till about 6 and make phone calls.”

At 13, she sold 1,400 boxes. At 14, she sold 1,600 boxes. At 15, she figures she will sell only 700 or 800 boxes, but not for lack of trying. There are more Girl Scouts in her church now, and the competition for sales to church members is much stiffer.

In Tuskegee, Ala., Girl Scout Troop 188 went even farther afield than the local church, literally tearing up the telephone directory and handing a chunk to each Scout. Sales went up, said Carolyn Bland, one of the troop’s two leaders.

The Girl Scouts of Southwestern Connecticut had mixed luck when it ran a pilot telemarketing project in 1989. In the rural community of Westin--an area of weekend homes and affluent families--the participating troop sold 456 boxes in six hours. But Scouts in the city of Danbury sold a disappointing 91 boxes in four hours, said Lois Fusco, the council’s director of public relations and product sales.