COLUMN ONE : Sales Skills a Hard Sell in E. Berlin : They used to be unnecessary. Now, under a free-market system, vendors must learn confidence and street savvy. For some, lesson one is how to smile.

The woman in aquamarine eyeliner sneaks past the security guard and clicketyclacks up four flights of stairs in her stilettos.

She enters a lunchroom where half a dozen dour workers puff on cigarettes. They smile when they see her.

She makes her delivery, passing little white bags around the table. Everyone peeks inside each others’ bags. They nod approvingly.

The woman collects her money and takes new orders. She hurries past the shouting guard with a merry wave, promising to sign in the next time she visits the office building.

She feels daring, exciting, almost dangerous. Only a year ago, she could have been arrested for doing this.

But this is a brave new East Germany, and she is--yes!--a brave new Avon lady.

A month after plunging into the free-market system, East Germany suddenly finds itself sampling not only new products but also a new profession.

Sales.

Under the old Communist regime, competition was non-existent, goods were scarce and salesmanship was beside the point.

Now, irked hausfraus are shooing away door-to-door rug merchants, and historic Alexanderplatz is so jammed with street vendors that McDonald’s was refused a permit to test-market Big Macs from a curbside van.

All this hustle reflects not just blossoming ambitions but desperation and uncertainty. Unemployment and bankruptcies are soaring as East Germany completes the change from 40 years of Communist central planning to the rigors of capitalism. Unification is expected to throw even more people out of their professions--for example, the East German diplomats now being offered retraining. Because they will no longer have a government left to represent, the Foreign Ministry is considering teaching them how to sell insurance.

“It’s all so confusing,” sighed the Avon lady, who requested anonymity because the export firm where she works doesn’t know she’s playing hooky to sell Furious Fuschia lipstick and Pina Colada shampoo.

“The firm is laying off people left and right, and it probably will close within a month,” she said of the export company. “I’m doing this to build up a nest egg. It’s hard, though, and too risky to count on for a living. Besides, I never know if I’m doing it right.

“Nobody ever taught us how to sell things,” she said.

Her bafflement is so common that many Western firms are starting to bring in high-priced consultants to train their East German recruits.

“You have to start at the very beginning,” said Wolfgang Denz, a West German marketing adviser who runs sales seminars for East German firms for a fee of 14,000 marks ($8,750) for two days.

“The very notion of sales never existed for them before,” Denz said. “It was all considered evil capitalism.”

Sales clerks were often rude, bored and corrupt.

“The stores seldom had anything to sell, and, when they did, the clerks usually divided most of the goods among their friends and family members,” he said.

“Nothing was ever sold; it was distributed,” he added. “There was never any reason to be polite or friendly or helpful or obliging to a customer.”

Going It Alone

Denz makes his students practice smiling. They learn how to exchange pleasantries with potential customers and listen to lambada music to set the mood. They chant slogans designed to boost confidence, such as: “I am a crazy stag!”

“You have to motivate them,” Denz explained, adding that many East Germans find his nine-hour classes taxing.

“What they lack most is courage,” he added. “Before, everything was collective; the emphasis was on the masses, not the individual.

“Now, there is no more collective. Suddenly they’re alone, and they have to find a way in the future.

“They’re like a rabbit facing a snake,” Denz said. “All they can do is tremble.”

Ironically, Denz finds that “the best East German salesmen are the people who used to be the best shoppers.”

“They knew how to be flexible and use their charm.”

Charm is something Harald Zinke is trying hard to pick up.

Zinke, 35, just started a new job selling kitchen tools from a card table in East Berlin’s central marketplace.

He spent hours at home practicing with the assorted gadgets. He’s hoping he won’t cut himself. That would be bad for the easy-going, self-assured image he is trying to cultivate.

“I worked in the forest before,” he said, as he sliced cucumbers into daisies.

“I spent six years by myself in the woods without talking to anyone all day,” Zinke said, abandoning the cucumbers to demonstrate a carrot curler.

“I’m still trying this job out,” he said. “This is just my second day. I have to remind myself to talk to the people who come by, to engage them and not slip into a droning monologue.”

Not everyone is so conscientious, noted Helmut Symanek, whose brother owns the kitchen utensil franchise.

“There are people who just don’t get it,” Symanek said. “We had one guy who set up his table and stood behind it all day with his hands in his pockets and a cigarette in his mouth, waiting until it was 6 o’clock. Then he took his table down and went home.”

“He was so accustomed to the old regime that he had absolutely no idea how to fight for his own survival.”

Zinke, a father of three whose wife works in a nearly bankrupt factory, isn’t sure he can survive as a salesman.

He figures he has to sell about 1,000 deutsche marks (about $620) worth of choppers, slicers and dicers a day to make ends meet.

Today is slow. So far, the shoppers seem more interested in Zinke’s vegetables than in his utensils. He gives away three cucumber slices and a carrot stick. An old woman buys a potato peeler. Another customer chooses a more expensive multiple-dicer.

“Watch your fingers with that,” Zinke warns.

“It’s scary to do something like this, where you can stand here all day and go home with just 10 marks (about $6) in your pocket,” he said.

“Humor is the key,” Symanek, the boss’s brother, said. “You have to joke with people. Watch.”

He takes a cucumber and slices it into perfect wheels with his handy-dandy grater.

“Easy as can be,” he tells onlookers, “and if you have fat guests coming for the weekend and don’t want them to eat all your food, all you have to do is turn this over and-- voila !--you get thinner slices.”

The number of salesmen and saleswomen in East Germany is not known--Avon has hired 4,000 already--and success rates vary wildly.

Newspapers in both Germanys are filled with classified ads seeking East German sales representatives, promising unlimited earning power, autonomy and company cars.

“A lot of people can’t imagine doing this,” the Avon lady said. “When I mentioned at work that I might give it a try, people were shocked and said they could never approach strangers or knock on doors.”

Although there is a great deal of curiosity about all the new and fancily packaged Western products, uncertainty about the economic future in a united Germany is clearly making many consumers cautious.

“Most of my customers want me to come around at their workplace so their husbands won’t know what they’re buying,” the Avon lady confided. “Everybody is too unsure about the future and worried about unemployment to spend money on luxuries like perfume and eye shadow.”

Reaches Quota

Still, on one hot morning, she met her personal quota of 300 marks (about $185) worth of sales within three hours, hiking up and down hundreds of stairs in high-rises that have no elevators. She will be able to pocket about 35% of that in commissions.

“A lot of people are mistrustful at first,” she said. “There were warnings in the newspapers to never let salesmen in the door, that it was dangerous.”

The Avon lady stops by the nurses’ station at a nursing home and does a brisk business in scented deodorant.

But, when it comes to sales technique, she is not exactly a crazy stag.

“Oh no, that’s too expensive, don’t you think?” she admonishes a customer interested in an anti-wrinkle treatment. She sells her a moisture cream for one-third the price instead.

The next stop is a kindergarten, where she persuades a jowly principal, who had spurned her sales overtures before, to buy lip balsam, face-peeling cream and the ever-popular deodorant.

Things are not going nearly so well for Harald Zinke, who has finally figured out the little gizmo that turns oranges into stars.

“Five-year guarantee; you never have to sharpen it!” he calls out.

The square is filled with vendors clamoring for the attention of the hot, bored browsers.

“Over here!” coaxes a man selling garlic oil pills.

“Special offer!” tries the vendor hawking fluorescent green lingerie with black lace trim.

A young woman sulks silently behind her table of ignored shower heads.

Zinke’s 12-hour day is almost over. He is surrounded by mounds of chopped, diced and curlicued produce. The day is not a huge success, he admits, but, by his measure, it’s not a total loss, either.

“After all,” he smiles, going one last round with a french-fry maker, “I still have all my fingers.”