Door-to-Door Sales--’The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’
They call it “cold canvassing,” and on this Saturday morning it was not only cold but wet. Rain beat down on the unseeded backyards of a new tract of homes in Canyon Country, far north of the San Fernando Valley, turning them into mud fields.
It was a crummy day to trudge door to door to try to talk somebody into buying a $600 vacuum cleaner, but Paul Karlebach’s attitude was, as always, positive.
“There’s the good, the bad and the ugly,” he said matter-of-factly. “Sometimes the bad and the ugly just happen to be there first, and the good is around the corner.”
Karlebach, a pleasantly confident 29-year-old transplanted New Yorker, needs those old saws. He needs the cassettes of famous motivational speakers he keeps in the cab of his small pickup truck. He needs the handwritten tips that he tapes to his steering wheel--”Do it now,” “Enthusiasm,” “Keep going.”
He needs them because he is one of a small group of salespeople who each day bang their heads against an implacable piece of conventional business wisdom: It’s harder than ever to make a full-time living by knocking on strange doors.
The increase in two-income families and society’s mounting suspicion of unknown faces means that there are fewer folks home to answer the door, or no one willing to open it. Of an estimated 6 million Americans who make a living in what is called “direct sales,” 90% do it only as a part-time income supplement, and most avoid cold canvassing by arranging home parties or office demonstrations or making phone calls to obtain appointments. When a company like Fuller Brush resisted such strategies in the 1960s and ‘70s by clinging to its tradition of full-time salesmen, its revenues fell by half.
“It’s a tough job,” said Harold H. Kassarjian, a UCLA marketing professor who specializes in consumer behavior. The homeowners a door-to-door salesman confronts are “downright nasty. (They) won’t open the door. There’s very little quality research, but my suspicion is that the average person who does this is somebody who just doesn’t have an opportunity for some other job. You’ve got to have an amazingly strong ego or be amazingly hungry.”
Karlebach, who sold framed pictures office-to-office in New York City and then home security systems in Los Angeles before catching on with the Kirby vacuum cleaner company, acknowledged the adversity as his truck headed down Soledad Canyon Road toward the new tract of homes he had targeted for today’s canvassing. He picked up one of the motivational speaker tapes on the truck seat.
“I’ve heard at least 50 different ones,” he said. “It keeps me associating with positive people. Usually you’re around people who say, ‘Nah, you can’t do that.’ Nobody stays ‘up’ all the time, but the whole trick is bouncebackability.
“I enjoy knowing I’m willing to do something most people are not willing to do. The fact that few people are willing to do it means there’s probably a future in it.”
The future comes at the price of constant rejection.
Karlebach says he tries to catch about 60 potential customers in their homes each day and talk them into letting him inside to put on a vigorous 90-minute demonstration of the Kirby. As bait he offers a free hand-held vacuum, worth about $39.
A successful day is one in which only 58 of the 60 refuse.
“I try to get a minimum of two demonstrations a day. Three is better, but two is what I’m satisfied with. I’ve got a good closing rate. When I show the product, half the time they’ll buy.”
It was time to go to work. He rolled up one street where new homes were still undergoing finishing touches and turned onto another that appeared occupied, a stretch of two-story homes of various pastel shades, many with newly planted front lawns.
He hopped out of the truck and began walking swiftly from house to house, clutching one boxed portable vacuum, only a sweater protecting him from the rain. It was a little after 10 a.m., so people were definitely home, but the first few he spoke to were not interested.
And then he came to Ashok Patel’s door.
Patel, a young, soft-spoken hospital X-ray technician who had moved into the neighborhood only two months earlier with his wife and 3-year-old son, answered Karlebach’s knock.
Kirby’s Promotion
Karlebach began telling Patel about the mini-vacuum, explaining that it was a promotion for Kirby, and asking if Patel was interested in having one. Patel, who speaks with a pronounced accent, said little but he did say yes to the offer--unaware, he said later, that a full-fledged demonstration was tied in.
Karlebach told Patel he was going back to the truck to get a new mini-vacuum, then raced back to the vehicle, drove it from the street into Patel’s driveway and lugged two big boxes and a briefcase of Kirby equipment into the home, through an unfurnished living room and into a small den that looked out on a muddy backyard. As Patel and his wife, Lina, watched from their sofa, Karlebach began crisply unpacking and setting up various pieces of the Kirby, which is billed as the equivalent of 12 individual cleaning systems.
Over the next hour and a half he was constantly in motion--kneeling, crouching, stretching and climbing, snapping and unsnapping countless pieces of the machine into place, inserting and removing a score of tiny black cloth filters so that the Patels could see the horrifying amounts of dirt picked up by the Kirby.
He juggled this with a poised, nonstop narration, integrating his descriptions with pet company slogans (“It doesn’t cost to have a Kirby as much as it pays to have a Kirby”), technical information (“It displaces more air per cubic inch than any machine on the market”) and personal chatter (“ That’s very fine dust, Lina,” he said, opening a filter after using an attachment to vacuum a den wall. “It’s been there since you moved in. It’s not your fault. . . .”). Soon the dusty rose carpet was covered with vacuum cleaner paraphernalia and the black filters that emphasized the previously unseen dirt.
Karlebach couldn’t tell whether he had been able to make a sale. The Patels on occasion nodded in agreement with his boasts and acknowledged that his machine was superior to their own. But while they appeared exceedingly patient as the demonstration progressed, they were giving no hint of willingness to buy. They did not ask the price and Karlebach did not volunteer it. That would be the final topic. He had a lot more work to do.
Her Bedroom Mattress
He was getting warm. He took off his sweater. He showed Lina Patel how the vacuum cleaner could be hooked over the shoulder to clean stairs. He took her up the stairs to clean her bedroom mattress. He came downstairs and picked out a spot of living room carpet near the service porch entry and had her run her own vacuum cleaner over it 25 times. Then he ran her machine over the same spot another 15 times. Then he ran the Kirby over the same spot twice--and unveiled a filter that contained a considerable portion of gritty dirt.
The demonstration is an enervating process. A veteran salesman in Karlebach’s office, John Ciccarelli, said he lost 20 pounds a few years ago when he became obsessed with winning a $3,000 prize Kirby’s western region offered to the top seller over a two-month period.
As the weeks progressed, the race boiled down to two sons of veteran Kirby distributors--Ciccarelli, who has worked for his father since graduating from high school 16 years ago, and a salesman from Fresno. Family and office pride exacerbated the competition, and soon Ciccarelli’s co-workers in his Granada Hills office were throwing every lead his way.
“I was doing everything that month--canvassing, going from 8 a.m. until 11 p.m. seven days a week,” Ciccarelli said. Selling 15 Kirbys a month “separates the men from the boys,” according to Karlebach, but in the second month of Ciccarelli’s contest he sold 51--in a February, no less.
12- to 14-Hour Days
So far in his half-year with Kirby, Karlebach’s best month is 23 sales. He is shooting for 24 in March. To do it, he says he works 12 to 14 hours a day, six days a week. He does some phone solicitation and receives some referrals from his home office, but cold canvassing “is your bread and butter.” He works on straight commission, and says he makes between $75 and $150 per unit, depending on the extras the customer purchases.
Inside the Patel home, he was facing some strategic problems. He wanted both husband and wife to watch the full demonstration, but workmen were arriving--one to repair a poorly installed washer, another to deliver furniture. First, Ashok Patel went out to check on the washer, and then his wife left to supervise the furniture delivery. Once they returned, Karlebach showed off the carpet-cleaning mechanism, discussed other extras, and was just about to present the price (done by writing it on a slip of paper and handing it to the couple, like a car salesman might do after a buyer has made an initial offer). But suddenly, Lina Patel had to return upstairs to tend to her son.
Karlebach stalled. He asked the husband for something to drink and waited until the wife returned, and now came the moment of truth. Could he close the deal?
Ashok Patel pondered the price on the piece of paper and said the worst thing possible.
“Well, right now I don’t need it.”
The Terms
Karlebach offered the standard terms--6, 12 or 18 months. Patel said he and his wife prefer to pay cash, and right now they were facing more immediate needs like furnishing their living room.
“I don’t think we can do it until next year, but we would contact you, definitely,” Lina Patel said. “The machine is really good.”
That was that. No arm-twisting. Karlebach began to pack up, another intensive 10-minute chore. At first he did it in silence, but soon he began whistling.
Across the street, Ciccarelli had also gotten inside a house for a demonstration and had closed a sale. But the rain was driving even harder now as noon arrived and soon he would call it a day.
“It’s never a waste of time because it’s a matter of numbers,” Ciccarelli said. “If you knock on 50 doors, three or four people are going to buy. The business has always been there. To go out like we did and create some business is more exciting than waiting in the office for someone to come in.”
