Door to door salespeople is certainly not as common as they used to be. “Fortunately,”, I was able to experience being one of them. In high school, our football booster club would sell “gold cards”. These cards were essentially just discount cards. They offered many discounts to various restaurants and stores in our area. We helped the companies out by getting more people to them and they helped us out by donating money to the football booster club. At the beginning of every season, we would take a day and divide players up to go sell these cards. Each group would take a different part of the town to go sell to. It was certainly a very interesting and fun experience. When I was a freshman, I would just let the upper classmen do all the talking and I’d just stand there in the back with my jersey on. I was not a big talker back then. As years went on, I began to get more comfortable speaking to random people and was able to “master” my pitch. At the time, it did not seem like I was learning much because it was just something we did every year. However, looking back on it, there was a lot of learning that came out of it. I was able to develop better personal skills and able to learn how pitch a product to someone. My first attempts at a pitch were to pretty much just rattle off all of the different discounts that were on the card. I made a few sales that way but i think it was just because they wanted to support the football team. As time went on, I began to talk a little more to the people before saying anything about the card. We would often end up talking about football because we were wearing our jerseys. It was much easier for people to buy the card after we had a little conversation beforehand.
The point to this story is that you may learn something from a past or present experience that you have. Sometimes we just go through the motions of things because we have to do it. There is always room for learning. I would’ve never thought selling those cards would have any benefit to me, but they ended having a huge impact on how I sell and communicate to people.
BoweryJE22
That’s a great example of how a seemingly mundane experience can provide valuable learning opportunities. Door-to-door sales can be a challenging experience, but as you mentioned, it can also help individuals develop better personal skills and learn how to pitch a product to someone. It’s interesting to see how you improved your pitch over time by engaging in conversations with people first, rather than just rattling off discounts. This shows the importance of building a connection with potential customers and how it can impact the outcome of a sales interaction.