Changing Jobs During a Pandemic

By John McNamee, Southport, United Kingdom

During the pandemic I had to find a new job. I previously worked in marketing, but once COVID-19 hit, there wasn’t much need for an advertising guy. Unless you could do one of those vomit inducing adverts from companies saying we know how tough it is right now. If they thought it was tough, they should try losing a job in marketing and going door to door trying to sell lawn care, which is what I ended up doing.

Life as a door to door lawn sales person isn’t easy. Most people presume I am delivering them a parcel when they answer the door. They stand there expectantly, and then I burst into my pitch about our amazing lawn care. They look very confused.

After confusion comes realization– I can see them thinking, Oh no he’s trying to sell me something, how can I get rid of him?

No one seems that interested, I explain to Tommy who I am placed with to work alongside. Tommy is a top seller. He could sell lawns to the Eskimos.

Rejection is part of door to door sales, Tommy explains. You need to knock on about 100 doors a day and should come away with about five to ten sales. Like I said, I’ve worked in marketing, and a five to ten percent conversion rate is incredible, but still, dealing with 90 in person rejections a day is tough.

One of Tommy’s many tricks was to pretend we were already doing the neighbors' lawns, which we weren’t. OK, this is slightly misleading, and I do feel slightly bad trying it, but it works a treat. No one wants their neighbor outdoing them!

I nearly got caught out when someone asked me which neighbor we were doing.

Startled, I nervously responded, “Err, we do Julie’s round the corner.”

They nodded and promptly signed up. Thankfully, no one actually knows their neighbors, and like me, they just pretend they do.

Yes I know, I’m a terrible person, but I need to make sales. The work is commission only, so you need to sell to make it worthwhile. In my other jobs, I've always been paid a salary, but working on commission did push me to work harder and also pushed my morals. It also gave me a buzz when I did manage to make a sale, knowing it directly benefited me. Of course the downside was the bad days when I didn’t get any sales and came home empty-handed. Turns out the grass isn’t always greener– a comfortable salary job has its benefits.

Having worked in marketing, I understand the capabilities of fancy digital marketing and algorithms. Door to door sales, though, has shown me the power of a simple conversation on someone’s doorstep, even when uninvited. Conversations allow you to look the customer in the eye and develop a face to face connection with them. No algorithm can do that.

In the times of lockdowns, isolation, and social distancing, we learned to understand and appreciate how important human connection is. Not everyone knows the name of their neighbor, but they know the guy who does their lawn, Tommy.