Hey, maybe if you came around my door back in the 1970s with that pitch, my parents might have gone for it!
“So you would simply spend most of the 55-minutes showing them what a great encyclopedia the Britannica was (after all it sells itself) and towards the end of the presentation, mention that for the price of a couple of cups of coffee a day, they can have ten years of updates and oh, by the way, if you agree to that, I’ll throw this entire set of encyclopedias in for free! “
You knock on a hundred doors to tell ten people that you are doing marketing research, three households let you present them, and you close one of them for your nights pay.
Those were the coarse numbers for rookies and mediocre salesmen.
The presentation is about seeking families that are interested in books, that will write a letter endorsing the encyclopedias, the presentation consisted of beautiful, large, full color presentation sheets, a steady monologue including getting a number of affirmative responses from the customer, closing with the updating services, and easy payments.
It is a beautiful experience to watch, my brother used to ask me to do it for him over and over and we would marvel at the perfection of every motion and every word of the script.
By the way, I learned that salesmen are huge suckers, at first I was nervous when I found out that the man I was pitching was a high powered successful salesman, but I learned to just stay on script, and you would have them in the palm of your hand.