Direct Selling - The Hardore way of selling

A couple of months back, a friend of mine was kind enough to give me an opportunity to see what he does for a living, Direct Selling. This is where the producer sells to the user, ultimate consumer or retailer without intervening middlemen such as wholesalers, retailers, or brokers. Direct selling offers many advantages to the customer, including lower prices and shopping from home.

But my friends company calls it 'Below the line' marketing. Yea!

Below the line means non-media advertising or promotion when no commission has been paid to the advertising agency. Includes direct mail, point of sale displays, giveaways and direct sales.

Ok enough Marketing 101 background crap. To summarize, this shit is hard. I knew that a door-to-door salesman had it bad, but I had no idea it was this bad. As my friend would spew out, 'the rewards are there'. If you are willing to put aside, for the moment, your ego and pride, you can be successful in this no doubt. You need to turn yourself into a robot, a drone, a worker or a thick-skinned dumbass of sorts.

The system is based on recruitment. The promise that one day you will have your own company. Management trainee they called it. The key here is that you need to be able to do the sales yourself before you can manage and lead people to do it for you. But before you can lead your own team, you have to be the donkey first. Recruit by example, "I succeeded like this and it works so please copy me" is one of the steps. The more people you train, the faster you get promoted into management. Sounds like a 'multilevel' thing to me but that's a forbidden word.

Without getting into specifics, there is a incentive payout throughout the ladder. How much you put in equals how much you get. Its pretty much like life I suppose. Anyhow, I was given training on all the steps needed to complete a sale. There things like, introduction, short story, pitch, turnaround etc. All laid out for you to deal with the negatives that you will face. Negatives indeed. For every 50 people you approach, 1 will say 'yes', and the others will tell you 'NO'. So its a numbers game, you need to approach many, many many people to make your target for the day. Put it this way, in my short stint, I counted, I approached over 2,000 people, managed to get say my whole sales pitch maybe 50 times, and I closed (completed a sale) 1 person. Tiring and tough? Yes.

What did I learn from this experience? I learnt that I can walk up to anyone and say 'hello'. I'm less afraid of the word 'No'. I appreciate life a little bit more. I thank god that I have other alternatives than to do this job. I learn that to be rich, you need to be the one at the top of the pyramid. I learned that to be a successful leader, you must lead by example. I learned that you can only inspire others through your own experiences. I learned the virtue of patience.

Did I succeed? Yes and No. Is this for me? No. Will I consider this again? Perhaps.

Why does my friend do it and Why do people do it? It is with the promise that if you succeed, reaching the top, you can afford your own Ferrari racing team or a hillside villa in Monacco. heh. Interested? Go right ahead.