Being The Door-2-Door Salesman Who Never Sold Anything (Part 2)
My First Day
The marathon begins.
It’s Monday morning. I wake up, shower, brush my teeth, fix my hair, and grab my paperwork (yes, physical paperwork is still a thing in 2020; if you don’t believe me, you should see my lawyer friends’ offices in 2023).
It was a battle to the death to get a shower in the morning because I live with 27 other people who all have dreams of becoming rockstars in the door-to-door industry, and there are only 4 bathrooms in the house. It was even more fun trying to make breakfast in the one kitchen the house had, on time before work started. Looking back, it was quite the ratio, and whoever was responsible for designing it this way (or the lack thereof) deserves a golf clap.
Having survived the morning warfare for bathroom occupancy and kitchen counter space, I was at least clean and fed as I headed to the first gathering of the day.
So, after I made it through those first couple of battles, I made my way to the common area.
The living room of the AirBNB that all the reps were paying $150 a week to stay at, or the “office,” as our managers would call it, was the epicenter of all our meetings in the mornings before we started working. It was called “Correlation,” or better known to the reps in this particular company as “Time to Drink the Correl-Aid.”
We typically spent the time in Correlation getting motivated before we went and started knocking on doors to help those of us who had a difficult time swallowing the constant rejection that you face being a door-to-door salesman.
I remember on this specific morning we were introduced to the managers who were the direct bosses of the people who were in charge of us, and our daily dose of motivation was them speaking about how wealthy they were because they knocked doors.
The motivational speeches were not without merit—their impact on the room was obvious.
Only it wasn’t the door knocking that made them wealthy (otherwise they’d still be doing it). It was running the teams that knocked doors for them which had given them the slightly exaggerated success they were talking about.
Nevertheless, everyone in the room was starstruck when they spoke and it got the job done.
I’d look to my left and to my right, and I saw people who were ready to run head first through brick walls if it meant they would make a sale.
It never failed to amaze me how sharing anecdotes of “success” or stories of how much money a person made in a particular summer revved everyone up for the day. It worked almost every time. My coworkers just totally forgot about the low statistical probability of having a good day. Those odds were even lower if you were brand new like most of us.
But even as we reveled in the success stories in attempt to get ready to seize the day. I later came to understand that there was something else just as vital–personal well-being.
I realized money isn’t worth it if your health is suffering and you’re unhappy with your life. You will eventually burn out and have no one to share it with. Additionally, your customers will notice & be turned off by you.
Speaking of statistics, imagine the impact door knocking can have on your mental health in addition to your personal well-being.
This isn’t verified in academic literature and I’m not sure there’s any research that exists on it, but from what I’ve seen, the average rep would knock on 100-200 doors a day and only one of those would be a qualified sale. Meaning, the person you sold the security system to had to own their house, and they had to pass credit.
Not only that, you’d be amazed at how many people in America don’t own their house or have a credit score of at least 600, and you’d be even more amazed at the number of people who lie about it. So think about how often you come so close to making a sale, and then your customer doesn’t meet these qualifications, so consequently… you don’t even get paid for making that sale.
I was not armed with this knowledge in the beginning, but I embarked on the journey my friend & co-worker Jack Rowley aptly termed as “Sales Boot Camp” anyway.
There was no training on the first day; the best they could do was give you an hour-long meeting in the morning to give you enough dopamine to hopefully help you experience what you were about to be put through, and allow you to follow someone who has done it successfully for one day.
I’ve chronicled this briefly on my LinkedIn page before, minus the detail... For my first day, I was told I was going to be walking around the neighborhood with this big Asian guy in his 30s named Adam. When I first met him, he told me to call him “Chief,” just like everyone else. Adam was a very straightforward, black-and-white, no-nonsense guy. As we spoke more, I began to learn more about Adam. He was originally from Tennessee, had a significantly younger brother whom he loved very much, grew up playing football, and actually played video games professionally.
After our introductory car conversation on the way to work, this is where my actual door knocking experience began.
Adam and I get out of the car, and we start our day.
Immediately, I’m invited into these strangers’ home. Adam had knocked on their door the night before, and the paperwork still needed to be finished, so it was the first thing on his to-do list because if he didn’t get that paperwork signed, it wouldn’t have counted as a sale… and he wouldn’t get paid.
Now I’m sitting in the house with this husband and wife and their two dogs while Adam pulls out the paperwork. I’m in listening mode; I don’t do anything, I don’t say anything, I don’t jump into anyone’s conversation. This is very important for two reasons:
Reason 1) You have 2 eyes, 2 ears, and 1 mouth, and when you’re trying to learn something new, it’s very important that you use them in that ratio.
Reason 2) The sales process is delicate. One word can turn someone off and blow up the whole thing. I’m not going to be the person who keeps another man from putting food on his plate, even if it’s by accident.
So, I mind my manners.
There’s a dynamic at play here that the untrained will not notice, and I definitely didn’t notice at the time either… but you’ll see this often in professional sales when you only focus on creating one champion... the wife was not involved when Adam originally made the sale. This is unavoidable in a D2D scenario because sometimes people aren’t home, they’re at work, they’re originally preoccupied, etc. But now she’s involved because we’re talking about payment. This is very similar to when you have a deal set up in the corporate world, and everyone is on board and ready to make the transaction, only to find out that the people who are involved, aren’t in charge of the checkbook—so they have to go tell the person who is.
This is a huge red light in sales if it can be avoided. When it can’t, it’s called a “one-legger.”
Bringing in the person who is in charge of the money at the end, or “the other leg,” is very dangerous because they have no context, no one has shown them any value.
It’s like asking Dad for $2,000, and you successfully explain to him why you need it, and he says, “Okay, sure.”
But when it’s time to pay, Mom has to cover it and she asks, “What’s this for?” And you answer, “It’s for a book,” and you’re not nearly as thorough in your explanation as you were with Dad.
Dad didn’t explain it to Mom either. So what’s the end result?
She’s going to tell you there’s a better chance of pigs flying & hell freezing over before she gives you that money.
But if you tell her it’s for school and it’s to make sure that you get good grades, like any good mom, now she’s open to it.
However, this still isn’t enough; she wants you to show her how it will help you get good grades & she wants you to make it make sense for her—the way it makes sense to Dad. And if you can’t do that, you’re not getting the book with her money.
It’s as simple as that.
It’s the same exact thing here.
It’s a surefire way to make sure you don’t get the sale if you don’t create value for the person with the checkbook.
His wife could potentially derail the entire operation here and tell me & Adam to go kick rocks.
In this instance, she is this man’s CFO (Chief Financial Officer), and if she didn’t want our product, it was over.
So what does this mean for us?
Adam has to completely start over and resell the entire system. I need to sit there, STFU, watch, and listen.
The end result was positive; he successfully got everyone to agree. So, we end up spending another hour at the house when it was supposed to just be a 15-minute interaction to get some papers signed, but he made the sale.
I had no idea what just happened. I thought it was just another Monday and I didn’t blink twice. After a few years and some reflection, I realized how impressive what he just did was, and that the room was an active mental war-zone.
After witnessing this one sale, I couldn’t help but reflect on what I’d learned and boil it down into valuable information.
There are a couple of key takeaways from my reflection:
The first is, when you start a deal, make sure you involve everyone who needs to be involved from the beginning; otherwise, you are creating more work for yourself, which in turn, steals your time, and your time is precious. You only have so much of it, and no matter what you do, you cannot create more of it.
This interaction was actually a huge chunk of our day if you look at it as an 11-hour workday (roughly). It’s 9% of our day and it’s spent on one single house, not to mention the amount of time he spent there the night before.
The second is, you don’t know what you don’t know. You may think you know everything you need to in order to be successful, but the truth is, you have no idea. Even a year into something, you need to realize you are still an infant in that world. Adam successfully pulled this off because he’d been doing it for 10 years, and he’d seen a thing or two. It was my first day; I had no idea of the level of skill and analysis it required to pull that off, let alone the amount of work it would take to actually put it into practice. Do yourself a favor now—get out of your own way and submit to the fact that you know nothing. You will learn so much more quickly.
I didn’t do this at first because after watching this, I’m thinking, “Jeez, how hard can this really be?”
I was such a fool.
It was insanely difficult, but contrary to what might be popular belief, this young & dumb mindset is what got me through it—or it at least got me through the next 10 hours of the day. It was a double-edged sword; it helped me & hurt me at the same time.
Anyways, the next 10 hours of that day, we walked around and knocked on every single door in that neighborhood.
It was at least 150 doors.
It was grueling to be told to f*ck off so much in such a short amount of time.
At one point, I broke my vow of silence and asked him, “You do this every day? Just like this?”
And he replied, “Yep, just like this. Every day.”
I asked, “You don’t take a break, or stop to eat?”
His reply was, “Nope, now catch up; I want to see if these people are home.”
And we carried on just like that until we had pitched everyone in that neighborhood.
I was in utter disbelief. I was amazed by the sheer volume of people we talked to. I was even more shocked that 150 people told us no in a 10-hour period.
I asked myself, “Really, every single one of them? Not a single person said ‘yes’ the rest of the day?”
As the sun set on this long, exhausting day, I was left with a profound sense of gratitude for what I had experienced and learned, but surprisingly enough… I never felt defeated. I was feeling more of a sense of intellectual enlightenment than dismay.
Don’t get me wrong, getting told “no” does not by any means feel good, but getting told no is important.
Sometimes you need to go through 150 “no’s” in order to get 1 “yes.” Adam had done this many times, and I have him to thank for teaching me it was possible.
The power is in the mindset.
You need to get told no as quickly as possible so you can to get to “yes.”
That “yes” could be anything.
That “yes” could change your life, but you’re still too busy beating yourself up over the last “no.”
So don’t give up because you could be 1 “no” away from “yes.”
This was a core value I had now.
Never stop searching for that one win.
It was ingrained into everything I did.
And I didn’t learn this until later on, but he let me shadow him out of the kindness of his heart. He wasn’t being compensated for it; we were all 1099 employees, and there was no tangible reward for doing it besides teaching the young guy how to fish for himself. The only person that got compensated for this was the manager running the team, but this is another one of the many valuable lessons that I learned along the way from Adam’s example.
He thought, if the team was doing well, that—by definition—meant you were doing well.
It turns out he was right.
Without these lessons, I would’ve been in for a rude awakening post-graduation.
I still hold Adam in very high regard. I couldn’t have been paired with someone who was better for me at the time. He was fantastic at cutting through the bullsh*t in a world where there seemed to be so much of it. He had principles and morals, and he wasn’t going to break them for any reason.
I’m still fresh out of my sophomore year of college; I needed to take after someone with the discernment and boldness of Adam if I was going to continue to survive here. It was going to be a roller coaster. It was going to be a lot of highs, and a lot more lows… & Adam may not realize this to this day, but he led by example, and I don’t know if I would’ve been able to hang in for the 2 years that I did without his example.
This was a turning point in my life.
This is where I found beauty in the struggle.
If you made it this far, thank you for reading!
This experience was only the beginning in what would be a long & arduous journey
Keep an eye out for Part 3 where we dive into the struggles I faced over the next 6 weeks and where I share what it was like to be fired.
& if you’ve enjoyed what you read, please share this with a friend