I started with White Oak Construction, and I walk into the lobby and see a Pro-Life plaque above their Bible they keep on a side table beside issues of Good Housekeeping and Sports Illustrated. Not a dealbreaker in Indiana, unfortunately. We start the sales lesson and I catch my trainer saying something along the lines of “… Is it dishonest? Maybe a little. But everyone else is doing it too, so.”
Ok, just because they’re dishonest in their sales pitch doesn’t mean I have to be. We go to a young woman’s house to look at her siding, and admittedly she needed a lot more work done than just siding. She says she works at a warehouse as an order picker, a job I’ve held before, and I know that job makes less than $20/hr. My trainer is crunching the numbers for her estimate and comes back with $124,000 for new gutters and siding. In my mind I’m going “There’s no fucking way that’s accurate.” She says she wants to get other estimates.
“But! We’re not in sales. We’re in advertising. We want to use our advertising budget to give you greater discounts in exchange for a sign in your yard, before and after pics, a handwritten letter of appreciation, and a promise that you won’t tell anyone about the discounts we’re giving you.” Magically, they can now do the whole project for $64k.
She doesn’t talk much, in general. She’s just clearly not a social person and obviously uncomfortable with two salesmen both over 6ft tall with tattoos in her dining room. She has gone from short sentences to simple one word answers to his questions. I can tell it’s frustrating my trainer.
He then switches his attack to just one piece of the project, the gutters. He starts pulling gutter samples out of his backpack trying to convince her to use our gutters instead of the cheap gutters. He’s laying it on thick. “The gutters keep water from getting behind your siding. That’s why you need new gutters. New siding will only hold up for a couple years without good gutters.” He crunches the numbers again and says he can do the gutters for less money. She says no.
This goes on for an hour. It’s 8pm, and we’ve been there since 4:30 knowing she has to go to bed at 9, and he’s dropping the price more and more with his magical advertising calculations trying to hook her, and she’s not budging. She’s uncomfortable. I’m uncomfortable. He’s relentless.
We eventually leave and drive away from the residence to talk in a church parking lot where he is fuming that he didn’t make the sale. We start for our respective homes and he calls me to keep talking about what he might’ve done differently to get the sale. I’m stunned.
“I don’t think this job is for me. I’m done.”
My supervisor calls me the next morning. I tell him the story. He says “Well if you want to work in sales, that’s pretty standard.” Scaring the shit out of a single income homeowner? No thanks.
ALWAYS get quotes from multiple companies.