Revised Diagnostic Essay

Alex Manley
Revised Diagnostic Essay
3 November 2009

My Most Interseting Job

“Hi, I’m Alex with Home Solutions of Virginia; we are out speaking with all the home owners in the area who still have their original windows and offering them a free estimate on our line of beautiful and energy efficient replacement windows.” If you are a home owner in the Hampton Roads area there is a chance that you’ve seen me before on your doorstep giving that pitch. During the summer of my senior year in high school I worked as a door to door canvasser pestering people to sign up for a free estimate on replacement windows. This job was my first experience in the field of sales and I quickly learned what a dirty business it is. My job was to be the friendly high school kid out to help you out with a free estimate to maybe improve your home. “Even if you’re not in the market to buy now, let us come out and educate you on some of the options out there”, I would tell people. By this I really meant let one of our salesmen come out and pressure you for a few hours until you either get mad a kick them out or give in and buy windows from us. It didn’t matter to me; I got paid by the number of appointments I set up.
The best part of the job was that all of my friends worked there. After a short briefing everyday at the home office we would pile into each other’s cars and head out to the designated areas we were given. Some days we wouldn’t knock on a single door. Instead we would head to one of our houses to hang out and get paid doing it. After the day we would head back and tell our bosses,”Man that area sucked, cross it off the map.” We just saw it as swindling the swindlers. After a while working there we started to realize that we were getting cheated out of our commit ions. Perfect leads would end up “no sales” or even worse “no pitches” which we didn’t even get paid for. When we called the homes back ourselves we would find out that they had bought windows weeks ago. Despite our occasional slacking off, our canvassing team had the best stats and was making the company more money than all the other company’s locations. One by one we all quit after realizing how we were being ripped off and shortly after Home Solution’s of Virginia Beach location closed its doors.

Image from:http://www.smoothharold.com/good-salesman/