Catalogue Sales Door-to-Door Done Wrong

Posted in money on 09.07.06@749 by pjh

Man just rang my doorbell, said “I left a catalogue a couple of days ago.”

If I hadn’t seen him deliver it then, I’d be as bewildered as you are now. There was no punchline, no sales pitch. Makes me want to shake him. But he’s gone now, so I’ll rant in your direction instead.

It’s a pyramid scheme of some sort, where someone drops off a catalogue and then collects it a few days later. They get paid by commission on your order, or doubtless by recruiting someone else to ‘run their own business’. The recruitment pitch is probably that the products sell themselves, and although you pay for the catalogues, they’re effectively zero-cost because of the collection and re-use. If you get them back, that is.

So this fellow, more enterprising that most, is coming around ringing doorbells on a Sunday to try to get his catalogues back. That’s his focus. Get the catalogue back.

There’s no money in getting it back, just cost savings. I think he’s lost sight of the purpose of the catalogue — product sales and commission. Surely he should be trying to sell me something — anything!

So this man who has taken the brave step of talking to me completely wasted the opp. He rang several doorbells at once, to deal with whoever whereever answered as efficiently as possible. No greeting, no “did you want anything then?”, no “did you need longer to look at it?”, no “is there anything in the same line that’s missing that I could source for you?”, no nothing. No warmth, no sales patter, no sale.

He was so wrapped up in the desperate hope and promise that the catalogue would do all of the selling for him, and that the catalogues wouldn’t set him back a penny — if only he can re-use them. You’ll have noticed already that he didn’t even properly ask for his catalogue back.

So much wasted energy focussed on the wrong aspect of what could be the right thing. Don’t you do that. Make the opportunity, and use it.

The catalogue itself was in my SO’s bedroom where she’d been looking at it, so I couldn’t give it back to him at the time. I left the catalogue outside as he requested, along with a copy of Geoff Burch’s Resistance is Useless. It hasn’t been collected yet…