IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/palchp/978-1-137-10809-8_4.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

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

In: Purpose, Meaning, and Action

Author

Listed:
  • David S. Schweingruber

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.

Suggested Citation

  • David S. Schweingruber, 2006. "The Why, What, and How of Selling Door-To-Door: Levels of Purpose and Perception in a Sales Company," Palgrave Macmillan Books, in: Kent A. McClelland & Thomas J. Fararo (ed.), Purpose, Meaning, and Action, chapter 4, pages 85-111, Palgrave Macmillan.
    • Handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-137-10809-8_4
    DOI: 10.1007/978-1-137-10809-8_4
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-137-10809-8_4. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.