When I was a young college student, I spent a winter break selling Cutco knives. It was one of my first sales experiences working for someone outside of my family, as a young adult. I was asked to reach out to my network of friends and family to try to solicit knives. At that age, most of my friends and family were people I knew not by choice but by proximity. It was strange calling high school friends, especially since many declined and that may have been my last interaction with them.
There was one particular day I won’t forget. We typically had training and meetings once a week after the initial onboarding. Our sales director asked a few of us to come in on Saturday to try to get ahead. I was interested in seeing what additional effort and work would yield, so I decided to come early that Saturday.
We went into a small room, not our usual conference room. There were maybe a dozen other people in the room. Danny was our sales director’s name. Danny said that Cutco needed more sales members and that we would help him find them. He passed around a notepad and pen to each person around the room and went back to the front. He pulled out a $20 bill and said the person who produced the largest list of potential Cutco employees got the $20. He said, “Go” and everyone started writing down names and numbers and scrolling through their phone.
I recalled Biel, the person’s name I was told when I was first called by Danny a few months ago. I was told Biel recommended me and thought I would do well in this program. Biel was a student a year above me who I had met casually through another club. Since he was older, at the time of Danny calling I thought Biel was doing me a favor. After working with Cutco for over a month, I realized where I was sitting. I was sitting where Biel was sitting months ago. Except I had stopped seeing Biel around the office. When I first did training, I saw him here and there. As the weeks passed, I didn’t. What was going on?
I had a friend who got really sucked into the program. Every time we met, he was talking about sales. Looking back, it’s kind of cute seeing his entrepreneurial spirit. At the time, it seemed like any other indoctrination I had seen him face, from Jehovah’s Witness to environmentalism. It was extremely annoying, especially since I had known him before sales. His enthusiasm for Cutco began to become off putting. He would later be pressured to open an office in central Illinois by Danny, only to have it fail months later.
Back in the class sized room on this Saturday morning, I looked at my phone and all around the room. Danny was busy looking at his phone, smiling at the prospects about to roll in. I put my pen up the paper and then gave up. I couldn’t write down a single name or number. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t get myself to fork over my contact list. When Danny’s phone timer went off, he asked us to finish our lists and turn them in. I turned in a blank sheet and ended up doing my last Cutco appointment that week.
Cutco primarily worked off of first hand recommendations. It taught me a lot of valuable sales skills, from scheduling tactics to navigating a close. While the products were good and the pay acceptable, it preyed on inexperienced college students and young adults to perform sales and to leverage young adults for their social networks, mostly of neighborhood families. The worst parts of Cutco were the assertiveness of their sales tactics and the indoctrination of naive salesmen. I am glad I was able to gather some practical advice from the little time I spent there and I’m glad I was able to keep my integrity when reflecting upon my situation and its inception. First hand recommendation is an incredibly strong sales tactic but a chance at $20 was not a worthwhile exchange with my adolescent phone book and it was a great lesson to learn early on.
Leadership, Design, Writing 