Do some salesmen make as much as a medical doctor? Yes, they do. The leads are handed out carefully. The best salesmen get the best leads. One can follow a salesman’s financial progress and see that (if he’s good, and he is polite to the sales manager) his revenue increases geometrically not linearly.
When a salesman makes a sale he is often rewarded with more leads of the type he just sold. The more he sells the more ideal the leads to him become. Yes, certain salesmen are more successful with certain types of leads. This stratification is by type of prospect and by product to be sold. Some salesmen convince educated middle aged women to buy. Some are good at selling windows and terrible at selling coatings. This is all taken into consideration as the leads are handed out. There also may be some hard cash slid under the table to the sales manager by a salesman to get good leads. A few salesmen even have wives and children to support.
Further, the sales manager has his own agenda. He needs to show the sales force that it really is possible to make the kind of money he promised in the newspaper advertisements that he used to lure new salesmen to his shop. If his ad said: “Make $200,000 a year in Home Improvement Sales” then he needs to have somebody around who is almost doing it. He might hand one salesman ideal leads to create that exemplar.
The lead data collected by the call center has information such as “single white female over 60, owns home, no children, and the address with zip code.
The zip code is nearly as important as the rest of the information. Certain zip codes are almost impossible to sell in, others are much easier. The richer neighborhoods are much harder to sell in. The people in the richer neighborhoods actually think. They would not have the homes and the cars that they have if they were “impulsive.
Other zip codes contain other really strange types of people. People really do stick to their own kind. America is not a “Melting Pot” but instead it is a “Salad Bowl.’
Some areas of a city have been milked dry by home improvement companies. In those neighborhoods there is usually at least one tattoo in every household. Line dancing is still in vogue. The old joke “Bubba just got arrested and this is the happiest he’s ever been! It’s the first time he’s been in a house that didn’t have six wheels and a trailer hitch!” is quite nearly true.
The most successful home improvement salesmen might be a sociopath. He almost has to be. The most successful home improvement salesmen don’t have wives or
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