My LinkedIn profile starts in 1998. My sales career started well before that, in a white Citroën C15 full of frozen food.
In the early nineties I was one of the Marlin Foods van drivers, selling frozen food door to door around Buckinghamshire and the surrounding areas, working out of the High Wycombe depot. Officially I was an Independent Local Van Operator. In practice, that meant I paid for everything. The van rent, the petrol, the uniform, all of it came out of my pocket before I’d earned a penny. No salary, just commission.
The day started at 7am at the depot, six days a week. Load the van, then training and motivation, whether you felt motivated or not.
Then you knocked on doors. The rejection rate was ferocious. I had plenty of regulars, but I had a lot of nos, and I do mean a lot. We didn’t have defined territories either, so now and then I’d knock on a door that one of my colleagues had knocked on a few hours earlier. You can imagine how pleased they were to see a second frozen food man before teatime.
The worst days were in winter. It was dark by four, it rained most of the time, and there’s nothing quite like standing on a wet doorstep in the dark, trying to sell frozen food to someone who doesn’t want to open the door. I was still out there, though. On commission, staying in the van doesn’t pay.
At around 3pm, the phone would ring. It was the depot manager, a seriously tough sales manager, asking where I was with my sales. If the answer was good, the call was short. If it was poor, I was on the receiving end of a tirade of very rude words. I learned a lot of new words in that van, and none of them were in my dictionary.
It was brutal, and I was good at it. I was earning around £500 a week after all my costs, which in the early nineties was proper money. In today’s terms it’s well over a thousand pounds a week, from selling frozen food out of the back of a van.
I stayed for just over a year. Then I started my own company doing exactly the same thing, but built on wholesale rather than doorsteps, using what I knew from the catering trade.
What the van gave me, more than anything, was a very thick skin. When you’ve been told no all morning and sworn at by your manager in the afternoon, a buyer who doesn’t answer an email doesn’t keep you awake at night. You learn that a no isn’t personal, that the next door might be a yes, and that the only way to find out is to knock on it.
I still work on commission today. Different products, different customers, a laptop instead of a van. But the deal hasn’t changed much. If I don’t sell, I don’t get paid.
It’s probably easier to learn sales on a training course, or in a university lecture theatre. I learned it on wet doorsteps in Buckinghamshire, with a man shouting down the phone at 3pm.
