The Why, What, and How of Selling Door-To-Door: Levels of Purpose and Perception in a Sales Company

David S. Schweingruber

Chapter 4 in Purpose, Meaning, and Action, 2006, pp 85-111 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract During July 1997, I spent a day with Julie (a pseudonym) as she sold educational books door-to-door. Julie usually worked alone so she was happy to have me join her as she walked and drove around a Midwestern suburban community. She knocked on her first door just before 8 a.m. and worked nearly nonstop for the next fourteen hours. Being a door-to-door salesperson for the Enterprise Company (a pseudonym) is a difficult job. The Company’s salespersons are supposed to run between doors to maximize their time talking to prospects. However, since the temperature was in the 90s the day I was with Julie, we walked instead. Unfortunately, only a dozen of the hundred people who answered the door allowed us into their air-conditioned homes. This cumulative rejection is actually more difficult for Enterprise salespersons than the physical wear-and-tear of carrying a heavy sample case eighty-one hours a week in all types of weather. I followed Julie, and other college students selling books door-to-door, in order to better understand “premise control,” the process by which a company attempts to control workers by changing the way they think. Enterprise uses this process in an attempt to create salespersons who will work hard even though no one is watching them.

Date: 2006
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-137-10809-8_4

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.palgrave.com/9781137108098

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-137-10809-8_4

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Palgrave Macmillan Books from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().