The art or lack there of, of the face to face sale
Door to door salesmen or in this case a person sent via a company to sell me their wares. Let’s back up first is the social media hook, do you want ..... to improve ... boy did I.
Good for the environment and might just eventually help my pocket sign me up. A moment’s weakness that turned into multiple calls during work hours - I work online and having disrupting calls where they talk so fast you don’t even know the company name, urgh!
After putting them off, I succumb and say sure an appointment, what will happen?
Oh you know, they’ll turn up do the survey to see if you can have ‘said product’ then go over facts and figures. Then quickly under their breath it should take an hour to 90 minutes... wait WTF?
But I’m game hoping I can chivvy them along (boy that was a nopey’d nope). The day is literally 2 days post call - that was quick! What about the pandemic people in your home etc.. oh they’ll wear a mask but are you sick? well no and I want to keep it that way.
The day arrives, 10am on the dot a chap rolls up with his bits and bobs - oh we sit down first (alarm bell one). Let me espouse on how different and why we are different to other vendors... an hour passes... He hasn’t even checked that we may not be able to have said product, another 15 minutes pass. Righto now that he’s repeated himself about a trillion times, he can pop on and do said survey.
10 minutes he walks back in - maskless, oh sure you forgot we are in lockdown 3 FFS!! aaaarrrrgggghhh my eyeballs and ears are bleeding. Anyway moving on I comment, then it’s ‘oops’ mask on and by the way you were right you can’t have that first option that I spent an hour and 15 espousing sorry, but here this could do you.
So precedes a bit of maths for 20 minutes then a short 15 minute pitch on the financial return for us along with the crippling length of time to pay it or.... hmmm. Then it’s the push to decide now.... I’m like hello no we want to discuss how you wasted 2 hours of our time when we could of just had you pop over not come in and pop the figures through the door, just urgh!
We politely decline to answer straight away and finally get him out the door. Before the lysol cloud can be disperesd on the chair and the hallway, along with our masks in the wash, washing hands, using first defence spray and taking our vitamins to cleanse ourselves from the expereince.
The answer is a resounding NO.
So to all the companies who push for face to face and the chat pitch, I dislike you and the more you push the more I will push back and ultimately probably not buy from you. Perhaps there are those who still like the baffling chat, but in my opinion that’s a solid no from me. I wonder if the chat is to stop you from reading between the lines and the ability to compare and contrast what’s written down... hmmm, food for thought there.
On that note it’s time for tea while the smell of dettol permeates my front room and I evacuate to the study.
