Word: southwesterner
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...ever denied that working with Southwestern is a long, hard, tiring summer experience. Without proper training, it would probably also be impossible. Everything in sales school is designed to help a student prepare himself for a successful summer...
...commonly held that Southwestern salesmen manipulate people who don't need the product into buying it anyway. If anything becomes clear after an entire summer of selling with Southwestern, it is that even the very best salesmen hear far more rejections than acceptances. Anyone who attends a Southwestern interview learns that the average salesman, who earns over $2,000, hears some 27 rejections per day in the course of hearing just three acceptances. The best salesmen do no more than listen to a person's needs, and then determine if and how the product might help to fill those needs...
Each salesman makes his own decisions as to whom he will try to sell to within his neighborhood territory. The statement of one Southwestern worker who quit that, "I had sold three houses in a row that day, and I was selling to people who couldn't afford the dictionaries," is especially noteworthy. If he felt that they could not afford the books, then why did he take their order at all? In the neighborhoods in which we work, there are literally thousands of other families who are financially able to save up the three to seven dollars a week...
Second, we would like to correct the notion that Southwestern misleads its workers. The implication that the company's training produces fully programmed, monotonously non-creative selling fanatics, and not self-sufficient, creative entrepeneurs as advertised--bears no resemblance to reality. It is entirely possible that a student could deliver the same, memorized talk at every house all summer long, but if he did it would be by his own choice. Every family has different needs and consequently different responses to us and the products we sell. If we fail to respond flexibly to different circumstances as we are trained...
Perhaps it is best characterized by the Southwestern Company, a direct home sales operation whose motto is "serving Mrs. Jones." To generalize, the customer is king in businessland. And providing his needs will be your foremost goal there, as well as, perhaps, your most important motivation...