Door knocking for dummies

As anyone who has seen my recent facebook statuses is already aware, Barbara and I are now fully and legitimately employed as door to door energy sales associates. We got the job a couple of weeks ago pretty easily (replied to a gumtree ad, rocked up to the office for a super informal interveiw and then two days of training) and then we were suddenly thrust into the deep end with a week long roadtrip to a country town to do our thang. I did alright and Barbara did amazingly, due to her excellent ability to talk incessantly until you have to take action to make her stop; for instance; changing your energy retailer. I put this down to a lifetime of trying to be heard over the rest of her family.

We've both learnt quite a lot about human beings and sales in this job, not all of it great, but at least the product we are selling is actually pretty good and I don't have to lie about it to get people to sign up. To be honest, I've heard people full on lying about what they're selling in order to get the sale (even if the person definitely wont pass the credit check), which in my mind is pretty shitty, and I really can't do that. (Which is weird, because when I was young I was a prolific liar. Now I find it really hard even if I gain money for it)

So here is how door to door sales works, for anyone who has not had the pleasure. Every day we are given about 150-300 doors to knock on. Between 10-40% of these will have 'Do not knock' stickers on them, and over 50% will not be home until after 2ish, depending on the area. Today I knocked on about 100 doors, and spoke to probably 30 people, all of whom said variations of "no". Sometimes we end up talking to the same person for an hour, sometimes its 5 minutes. Occasionally we get shouted at, but then people might offer us beer. Its a job of many possibilities.

Today, I had zero sales. Sometimes it happens. On Monday I was just walking down a road and a guy just basically walked up to me asking me to sign him up. This rarely happens. You end up just cherry picking houses that look like the people living there will be friendly and listen to your spiel and end up saying yes, but actually any house could be a sale regardless of how shitty their front lawn is or how many broken beer bottles are outside their house. Some of the people we work with are hideously judgmental, but you end up getting into that mindset when your whole paycheck depends on your confidence, personality and ability to build rapport and relate to people.

In the end its just a job, hopefully I can handle it long enough to save enough money to get to New Zealand and travel a bit more. I have been having fun though, got some great stories already that should probably never go on this blog.