![]() ![]() Phil scoffed, saying that his gun was all he needed: “ ‘We don’t even lock our doors.’ And I’m, like, ‘Sir, Phil, you need this! If you were to fall, and you were to be by yourself, you could potentially die.’ ” Taggart gazed imploringly into the dark, imbuing the salesmen with his concern, just as he had with Phil. “I’m, like, ‘Sir, Phil, you need this’ ”-a medical pendant, bundled with a fire alarm and door sensors for just fifty bucks a month. “Do you guys know that customer that’s, like, ‘I’m not buyin’ anything, but I’m bored and lonely, live by myself, and I just want to talk to somebody’?” There were chuckles. ![]() Then he met “this old guy named Phil,” in Canadian, Texas, a town in the Panhandle. In his second year selling alarms, he said, “I just was getting beat up.” He was “bageling”-recording no sales. He’s been swung at in Cabot, Arkansas arrested in Dimmitt, Texas called scum in more than forty states. When someone on their team won a Golden Door, a trophy for élite levels of annual sales, they roared and dapped.īut Taggart wanted to discuss failure. Fit, focussed, and wired on energy drinks, they whooped when a speaker’s exhortation resonated-“There’s gold behind that wall of fear!”-then inscribed the new mantra in their bullet journals. Taggart’s audience was largely bearded young men with fade haircuts wearing jeans, Henley T-shirts, expensive sneakers, and watches that tracked their steps. “You find the person’s problem-‘My skin isn’t good’ or ‘I got broken into’ or ‘I don’t believe in anything’-and you solve it through your product.” Gracias, mis nuevos amigos! He knows exactly how to inveigle customers into buying a better way of life. to practice the language as he goes into his spiel, miraculously achieve fluency, and walk off with a sale. When he knocks at a Hispanic family’s door, he’ll blurt a halting phrase in Spanish: “ Estoy aprendiendo, ah . . . sorry!” Then he’ll ask if it’s O.K. At thirty-two, he has talked his way out of dozens of speeding tickets. And you get rejected over and over and over-you’ll probably only sell two out of a hundred knocks.” “You’re working for free every day until you make a sale. of Aptive Environmental, which dispatches some seventy per cent of the knockers in pest control, told me. “Direct-to-home is the hardest job in the world, outside of being in the military,” Vess Pearson, the C.E.O. Encyclopedia salesmen once practiced an “ascending close” that required summoning forty-two yeses-but even that Joycean crescendo of acquiescence didn’t guarantee a sale. Patterson believed questions that elicit a “yes” prime the customer to agree to a purchase. Patterson, who founded National Cash Register. One trusty method is the “yes train,” an idea formalized in the eighteen-eighties by John H. Taggart’s company, the D2D Experts, has an online “university” of hundreds of videos that show sales reps exactly what to say and how to say it. Salesmen are particularly susceptible to the American impulse to turn every art into a science. He faces an unknown and often hostile customer with only his own brain for backup. Unlike the salesman who hawks minivans or enterprise software, the door knocker can’t network at the Rotary Club, make a catchy commercial, or research his prospect’s needs. The best door-to-door salesmen can earn more than a million dollars a year, but it’s a punishing way of life. You can hang up on a telemarketer, but not on the insistent young man who won’t leave your doorstep until you buy some goddam thing-pest control, an alarm system, solar panels, a new roof, magazines, scented candles, paintless autobody dent repair, or perhaps tri-tip steaks from a delivery van that, he swears, just broke down in front of your house. It was a crisp January morning at the fifth D2DCon, an annual conference in Salt Lake City that’s the centerpiece of Taggart’s campaign to elevate a profession reviled by nearly everyone. Relaxed and sincere, he roamed the stage at the Salt Palace Convention Center, selling fifteen hundred door-to-door salesmen on selling. For eight minutes, Sam Taggart had them all hooked. ![]()
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