We were going to the worst neighborhoods you can imagine, I suppose because there are a lot of break ins there? I was in a few houses where there was dog crap all over the floor, like a lot of it. Bad neighborhoods, nonexistent credit. As far as the quality of the systems goes, we only knew what the brochures told us, we had no hands on experience with the actual product. Lovely huh?
Did this selling Cutco knives the summer before college. End of the summer, they went back and retroactively disqualified a bunch of the presentations I’d done, and told me they could only pay me about half of what I’d been “guaranteed” as the minimum base pay. Then I was told that I should have done fewer presentations (base pay was based on meeting a certain minimum number, of course, which I’d done) in order to sell more and make my money entirely by commission.
I actually lost money that summer (and I was trying to save some for college, duh) because I’d had to pay for my sales kit of demo knives up front.
About three weeks after I’d signed their shitty contract accepting that they’d screwed me over on the money, they wrote me a letter saying that one of the knife sets I’d actually sold had been returned for a refund, and they wanted their commission back from me. We sent them a letter essentially telling them to fuck themselves. (i.e. that signed contracts are binding on both parties, kthxbye.)
Unless you think you can make money on commission only, I wouldn’t do it. They WILL find a way to weasel out of paying you the “guaranteed” minimum base pay.
I sold Kirby for about 2 months. I drove all over the state on my dime. When I did make a sale any negotiated price came out of what would have been my commission and if their credit wasn’t top notch then the higher fees for credit came out of my commission. At the point I had sold about 10 of the things and never saw more than 200$ I got out.
Unless you are a great salesman and have the stomach for the hard sell you will be free labor. All the risk comes out of your pocket. If you sell something the owner gets money if you don’t it didn’t cost him anything.
Oh, you will never ever see the “guaranteed salary”. It is almost impossible to do the number of qualified pitches to meet the quota without working 11-12 hour days 7 days a week. Even then they will tell you that one didn’t count because the husband wasn’t there or some such noise.
And then there were the days that they told you they didn’t have enough appointments for everyone so we had to do the cold phone calls to try to line up targets.
Horrid horrid job with really slimy people.
I would be worried that there just aren’t that many people buying $1000 vacuums in this economy. Most would rather have dirty carpets than spend the money to clean them.
One viewing of GlennGary Glen Ross was enough to send me running from sales work.
We had those kirby guys come by once. We were thining about getting the carpet cleaned anyway, so I let them in. 2 guys, then eventually a “closer/mgr”. One of the first guys was quiet and my forensic psychologist gf noticed his gang tattoos and asked. Turned out it was his first few days on the job, had a wife and kid, really wanted to stay out this time, etc. Great. But she works with these guys all the time and he seemed sincere and humble. The other guy was young and into it. too into it really. Couldn’t get them to clean the carpet before they babbled for an hour or so. Eventually they did, the machine worked as advertised, but would it last? And for that price, I could call the local carpet cleaners once a month for a year. High pressure sales from the closer guy, to rival the worst used car salesman. Finally got them to leave. Another group showed up some months later, wouldn’t let them inside, they wouldn’t leave, had to threaten to dial the cops with the phone in my hand and heading for my ear before they left. They haven’t been back but I imagine they will.
Speaking of scam jobs, don’t go near “mag vrews”…google is your friend
You don’t get the $420 anyway. It is some multiple of the commission per sale is it not? They apply their voodoo economics in such a way that “if you complete so many presentations you will make one sale every X presentations and that’s a minimum of $420 per week.”
If you suggest that you would be happy with the $420 as a flat pay your team leader will say something like “gee if we agreed to that and you made more than X sales we couldn’t pay you for all those extra sales. That would be no good would it? No, of course not Scotty Mo. I think you’ll be one of our new stars. Do you think that Scotty Mo? Yeah, high five!”
Mention it again after no sales are forthcoming and you are done. A little while later it will all be a puzzling memory. Honest.
Yeah it’s Kirby. I didn’t know if I could use like actual names of products and things like that. Does anyone know the rules on the dope regarding this type of thing?
To be precise it’s actually $2,200 a vaccuum.
What I’m wondering is how much they actually straight up lie to you. After the first day, a couple people didn’t come back. One of them was a good looking kid who seemed rather confident. She said she asked him not to come back. Now I’m thinking there’s no way you didn’t ask that kid to not come back. He was cooler and more attractive than anyone in the room.
She told a lot of stories, and I just wonder how many of them are straight up lies.