Sale Team Six
During the June between my Sophomore and Junior years here at the University of Illinois, I was hired for a "market research" job. I was told I'd be part of an elite team of young go-getters who set their own goals, excel in person-to-person marketing, are highly self-motivated, and are extremely susceptible to business jargon brainwashing like that. Naturally, as an ignorant student hungry for anything that said "paid internship", I accepted.
Now, just to be clear, this was a commission-only door-to-door sales job with a multi-level marketing structure to it. You'd start out on the lowest rung (Future Leader), be assigned to a team led by someone in the second-lowest rung (Leader), and once you proved yourself to be a completely mindless drone who believed 100% in the system (and made a lot of money for the fourth-level employees), you'd be promoted to Leader, where you work for a third level employee (Assistant Manager) and your goal is just to hire more people for your team and make sure they don't realize the scam or quit. This goes on in this pattern for basically forever, as do most successful pyramid schemes. For the purposes of relating to the text, the average office was composed mainly of Simple Hierarchies, where an Assistant Manager is the boss of a Leader who runs a team of Future Leaders.
Essentially, the Assistant Manager's job was to make sure his or her Leaders were achieving certain sales quotas for their teams. The Assistant Manager also comes up with ideas for sales pitches, promotional materials, and takes orders from the shadowy company above them. We weren't allowed to know who is in charge or what they do (in fact we only knew they existed because they two smiling faces were displayed in portraits above the front door), so I will proceed as if the Assistant Manager is the "top boss". The Leader then acts as a middle manager, taking orders from the Assistant Manager and parlaying them down to his or her team of Future Leaders, who then go out and sell people services like electricity plans and AT&T contracts. The Future Leaders collect some commission, the Leader gets a cut of commission from all of the Future Leaders in his or her team, and the Assistant Manager gets a cut of every single sale under their umbrella of influence.
So, was this sales cult high-performing? Well, Katzenbach and Smith would certainly say so. Although they held very little power in the grand scheme of things, the Future Leaders had a ton of freedom over their actual job performance. You'd only be in the office for 30 minutes in the morning, and for 10 minutes to check in with your boss before you clock out. The rest of your 8-hour workday was spent "in the field", which means knocking on doors and walking into business. Outside of training, you are completely on your own and have zero supervision (outside of being required to provide data such as number of people you spoke to, sales made, etc). Since you were working entirely on commission, every employee was highly motivated to do their best. Your Leader would provide you with exact individual goals for sales, and then would provide everyone with goals for the team. If the your team made their goals but you didn't, they used a ton of humiliating techniques to punish you, and vice versa. The average Leader's team consisted of 6-8 people, making for a very manageable team size. They developed the right mix of expertise, because anyone who didn't do well or work well with others ended up quitting pretty quickly anyway (95% of employees quit in their first month). The employees that remained were all pretty damn good at sales, and also resulted in a common commitment toward working relationships.
Overall, through its brainwashing techniques and rigid, soulless, data-driven structure, this sales pyramid scheme was able to run what was technically a successful team, even if all they were succeeding at was sending money straight to the top.
Now, just to be clear, this was a commission-only door-to-door sales job with a multi-level marketing structure to it. You'd start out on the lowest rung (Future Leader), be assigned to a team led by someone in the second-lowest rung (Leader), and once you proved yourself to be a completely mindless drone who believed 100% in the system (and made a lot of money for the fourth-level employees), you'd be promoted to Leader, where you work for a third level employee (Assistant Manager) and your goal is just to hire more people for your team and make sure they don't realize the scam or quit. This goes on in this pattern for basically forever, as do most successful pyramid schemes. For the purposes of relating to the text, the average office was composed mainly of Simple Hierarchies, where an Assistant Manager is the boss of a Leader who runs a team of Future Leaders.
Essentially, the Assistant Manager's job was to make sure his or her Leaders were achieving certain sales quotas for their teams. The Assistant Manager also comes up with ideas for sales pitches, promotional materials, and takes orders from the shadowy company above them. We weren't allowed to know who is in charge or what they do (in fact we only knew they existed because they two smiling faces were displayed in portraits above the front door), so I will proceed as if the Assistant Manager is the "top boss". The Leader then acts as a middle manager, taking orders from the Assistant Manager and parlaying them down to his or her team of Future Leaders, who then go out and sell people services like electricity plans and AT&T contracts. The Future Leaders collect some commission, the Leader gets a cut of commission from all of the Future Leaders in his or her team, and the Assistant Manager gets a cut of every single sale under their umbrella of influence.
So, was this sales cult high-performing? Well, Katzenbach and Smith would certainly say so. Although they held very little power in the grand scheme of things, the Future Leaders had a ton of freedom over their actual job performance. You'd only be in the office for 30 minutes in the morning, and for 10 minutes to check in with your boss before you clock out. The rest of your 8-hour workday was spent "in the field", which means knocking on doors and walking into business. Outside of training, you are completely on your own and have zero supervision (outside of being required to provide data such as number of people you spoke to, sales made, etc). Since you were working entirely on commission, every employee was highly motivated to do their best. Your Leader would provide you with exact individual goals for sales, and then would provide everyone with goals for the team. If the your team made their goals but you didn't, they used a ton of humiliating techniques to punish you, and vice versa. The average Leader's team consisted of 6-8 people, making for a very manageable team size. They developed the right mix of expertise, because anyone who didn't do well or work well with others ended up quitting pretty quickly anyway (95% of employees quit in their first month). The employees that remained were all pretty damn good at sales, and also resulted in a common commitment toward working relationships.
Overall, through its brainwashing techniques and rigid, soulless, data-driven structure, this sales pyramid scheme was able to run what was technically a successful team, even if all they were succeeding at was sending money straight to the top.
Only commission?!? That sounds like a grueling experience. It seems like you certainly learned a lot about how the company and their shady structure worked. With the way payment was setup it seems like many people could have quit simply for not getting any money. And why wouldn't they if they could get a minium pay job somewhere else? Did they consider to do anything about the high attrition rate? It would seem like just by offering a little more incentive to not quit, the extra feet on the ground might boost sales. Perhaps not though. What sort of returns could you hope to get with a sale?
ReplyDeletePlease get your posts in earlier in the future. This one is being marked late.
ReplyDeleteI gather you were bitter writing this. You are giving experience that is the opposite of the prompt. I'm truly sorry that you had to go through this. But, given that you did, the writing about it might be different. One possibility would be to aim at an arm's length critique of the experience. Another approach might be to indulge gallows humor - it seems you have had experiences that say more about the opposite of the prompt than that support it. Even if you can't buy into all the premises that are given in the prompt, you can be straightforward about what it is that you are writing. That would be something.
Yes, it is absolutely true that I was bitter of the experience, as I felt that I had been tricked and used for an entire month. However, given how successfully they were able to manipulate me and my coworkers, I genuinely believe that this is a successful team model. If we assume that the ultimate goal of this business was to funnel money upwards to the employees on the higher rungs of the ladder (which is the basic pyramid scheme model), then it certainly did its job. As someone who snuck a peek at the books occasionally when entering my numbers for the day, I can assure you that this cheap little office was bringing in tons of revenue. I have no clue what the costs of the physical office space are, but the company didn't pay for travel, food, or anything that the employees need to do the job. The bosses-of-bosses structure gave the lowest level employees something to aspire to: eventually becoming the boss of your own team, and then you aspire to become the boss of a team of Leaders, and so on. Part of why the pyramid drives people in is the sense of quick escalation and how simple it all looks. Everyone did exactly what they needed to do to meet quotas and they got good at anything the team needed because otherwise they would go home with a tiny paycheck or they'd be humiliated by the boss. It's cruel, it's taking advantage of people, but it works. I dare say it's opportunistic.
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