I ship out, you know, it was one of those like typical training stories where you’re like, you meet the manager for the first time when you’re out there, he shadows you for an hour or two. Then Saturday comes and he is like, all right, you’re on your own, good luck. He gave me some contracts and made me figure it out, you know? It kind of comes back to your whole training and practice. I realized that, luckily, I had door to door experience. Luckily, I was in the trenches all through high school and junior high and was able to really know how to transact and know what it was like to have objections and know what it was like to really be in sales. It wasn’t a new kick to the face, but I think it’s a new language.
It’s like medicine. It’s like, if I were to ask you to go do surgery on somebody right now, you’d be like, uh, okay, I guess I can cut in. And you, you would feel very uncomfortable, you know? It’s like, I don’t know, what’s under this skin. I’m assuming there’s blood in there and muscles and somewhere I should not cut. It’s funny you use that analogy, but it’s like this. So, luckily, I had spoken that language for a while. I ended up selling five my first day and I hit it off right away. I go back to the office and everybody was like, whoa, how? How did you do that? Like, that’s amazing! And I was like, I don’t know.
Be Positive
I really just went out there and told people that they get an alarm. It’s, you know, 50 bucks a month or whatever. So, I learned real quick that mindset has everything to do with your sales ability. That next week I only sold five the whole week and I was humbled back to like, oh, I gotta actually learn this. I went through my ups and downs. I was about average my first year, maybe a little above average. I closed like 80 something. Throughout the years I got better and better. In 2014 I finished number one at Vivint. Out of 3000 something people. I ran big teams and sold a lot of alarm systems.
Don’t Let Them Break You
And then for the last three, four years, I’ve really just kind of felt like there was a big void in the door door space. I felt like I was seeing a lot of deceptive sales practices. That’s why you get the complaints. A lot of people were really under trained there weren’t any resources. It’s funny. I had started a Facebook group. We called it, “Can’t Knock This” back then. I would ask like other sales reps to post their training and I would say, Hey, will you post a video of like a nugget or this or that? My regional manager actually shut me down. Vivint was like, you can’t do that. You can’t do that because of this and this and this. Right? They kept like smashing on it. That’s when I went rouge.
There Is Always A Better Way
I was, I was gonna go do it anyway. I kept getting the slap on the wrist kind of thing. Like Sam stop, like what if somebody finds that video and then uses it against us? You know, there’s a lot of scrutiny around this sales and, you know, they wanna manipulate like us just trying to do our job right. And that’s unbelievable. So, then I just started my own website. I created a website for my team and it was private to my team called “The Pack”. I made my own training videos. I thought Vinvint’s training was okay. But, I was like, that’s subpar. You’d think for like a billion dollar company, they’d be better videos. So, I made my own videos and my guys performed a lot better than most everybody else. We had the highest rookie per average, out of 150 teams. We had really great results. Everybody was like, what are you doing? They’re like, well, Sam’s training website. And everybody’s like, oh, how do I get access? I’m like, you have got to come work for me. So, I had this like private rogue website that nobody knew about cause, I didn’t want to get in trouble again.
Help Lift Others
I left and did solar. So, why then a couple months later I was like, why do I care if anybody has these videos? So, then I just posted for anybody who would want free training videos. I basically said, here you go, I’m not using it. I just shared it. All of a sudden companies and other reps from all over the world were watching these videos. I would get like 500-700 clicks a day. I was like, wow, this actually somehow went viral. Everybody sort of shared this. Everybody shared my private, like ghetto videos with my phone. You know, they weren’t anything great. It was so ghetto and that’s awesome. I came to the realization that there was a big need for training, especially amongst the smaller companies.
Keep A Good Reputation
That’s great, you know, and obviously we want to teach these smaller companies to do it right. We’re not in the business of doing some deceptive stuff. Our mission is to unify up level and bring honor and integrity to the door to door space. I’m a firm believer of you can go door to door and do it right. You can keep a good reputation. You don’t have to have scummy people out there. You don’t have to screw over customers and you can transact very healthily. I think that the companies that adopt a good door to door sales program and treat it with love and give it some good TLC, like investing in their training and onboarding systems are going to perform at a high level. It is just easier to have a positive mindset when you know you are being honest. Then that mindset, in turn, has a direct correlation to your success on the door.
