Door-to-door sales…the last frontier (the 19th century’s, that is)

Not sure how many folks saw Stefan Stern’s FT article Desperate Sales Measures.  Sometimes I think BCG throws stuff up against the wall — they do have some brilliant folks — but as a colleague said “how did they let this out the door?”

I did some door-to-door back in the day, and the article is certainly spot on about best practices (in fairness, the BCG pdf is here). It does have a certain plausibility when you read it, but it is more of a business history article.  I felt like I was reading a copied archival text, perhaps some 100-year-old Fuller Brush management training manual. Or maybe my old encyclopedia salesman’s guide…