no title

Well well well, am I a quitter?.. decide for yourself ;)

I shall be diplomatic, at least for the moment, never know who might read it … Monday we headed out selling the discount cards. The idea is simple, you’ve probably seen the things yourself, you buy the card ($30) and then you can get savings of over $300. Of course to get the savings you have to spend more.. but hey, thems the breaks.

So, we were given an area of town to target. 6 of us went out – paired up – 4 blokes from School I reckon – 6th years ish. And they were Steve, Greg, Patrick and Mike. I think. Not that it matters of course ;) And then there was Roelf and I. Roelf was quite sound, 30 ish, and Dutch. But we won’t hold that against him. I’ve met some quite nice Dutch, in fact, I think all the Dutch people I’ve ever met have been pretty sound. Even met two in Vietnam. They’re everywhere.

Anyway, off we headed downtown, armed with packs of vouchers, and a wee card saying who we were with… And I did try, I honestly did! – in my defence…

No one sold anything

The 4 lads quit after 2 hours

So I at least tried for the day… we then came back to the HQ to regroup and formulate our plans. And came up with some quite good ones, i.e. target the people in the right areas (so we were selling cards which basically discounted kids to the cinema etc. so lets go sell where the kids are..) Also we had a new card to sell, well two of them actually, one a voucher for Hair Stuff (no I don’t know what a Root Wave / Full Wave / is.. though I do now. I think. And a way cool card for beauty and health stuff, manicures, exfoliating scrubs etc. And my personal favourite a..

vibrasuan

Any ideas? No? – well basically it’s a sunbed and massage thingy rolled into one. So you lie in this thing for 10 mins and then when you come out you’re nicely massaged and tanned.

So… the next day – today – (Tuesday) we arrived at 10am and off we went after seeing a Motivational Video. Which was all about perceptions… and how basically nothing is a failure. Nothing. Unless you quit.

A failure is just a way to show you what you’re doing wrong

A failure is just a way to let you laugh at the situation

etc. etc. There were better ones, but it was quite funny.. they have all these stats – like Thomas Edison had 10,000 experiments (apparently) before he hit on the lightbulb that worked.. and what if he’d stopped at 9,999. And someone asked him when he finally got it – “But Mr. Edison, how did you keep going after failing 9,999 times” And Tommy said ” I didn’t fail 9,999 times, I just found 9,999 ways that it wouldn’t work” (resounding cheers ring out at this point).

So off we went, Roelf and I, as everyone else had quit. We were given a residential area to try, so off I went as a real door-to-door salesman. And, I have to be honest, when we still didn’t sell anything…while I did get a little disheartened, to be honest the reason to quit – well – it was partly morals. The lady that we are working for, is a really lovely person, incredibly enthusiastic, convinced that it will work (and it may), and I just hated letting her down. And the thing is, it costs her around about $300 per day to have the two of us out there.. and not bringing anything in.. well I just thought ‘is this fair?’. And the answer was no.

This is all getting very deep! :) hehehhee, so yeah, Roelf and I had a wee chat, and we called them up and they collected us, and we basically told them where we were at. And they were super nice about it, they’re sure this is going to work.. and so they’ll just work out how to make it happen. And they were right, we did come a long way in a few days, the way we were selling changed, and many other things, we gave them feedback from the customers.. it all helps.

Just didn’t sell anything!

So I went bouldering for an hour and came home.

So yeah, door to door sales, is, honestly, quite hard. Worth giving a try just so as you know you can / can’t do it.. I’m not entirely convinced that I can’t do it with a little mentoring – e.g. role playing before you went out, that sort of thing.. but to try and do it from scratch with no experience with products you’re not overly familiar with… that’s hard.

Still, defiantly worth a shot, and I’m very happy I tried, but to have made a sale, well that would have been special ;)

So back to the drawing board somewhat, am going to look into bike couriering, as that’s something I reckon I’d love. A friend of mine is currently doing that around Dublin, and has been since about March, and is loving it. So we’ll see, I’ve seen them cycling around, so the companies do exist… twould keep you fit too. But at least I know I’d prefer labouring to door to door sales, that’s something to know!