Vector Marketing

[agzg]

My hometown is about 15 miles away from Olean NY where Cutco/Vector is headquartered. Actually, my aunt lives about 5 houses down from the CEO (or owner I don't remember whether they're publicly traded or not) of the company. My dad's next door neighbor is one of their engineers (he actually designs a lot of the knives).

Needless to say, everyone in my hometown has some sort of set of Cutco knives in their house, and they truly are very very nice. The fun thing about having a design engineer next door was that my mom was able to get any type of knife she wanted, even if there wasn't currently a design for that function. She got a "Christmas ham scoring knife." That one probably didn't go into production.

Anyway that's beside the point. The door to door sales is something I tried to do once and failed miserably at. I give people a lot of credit if they can love it and make money at it. The worst thing, I think, about the way they sell their knives is that if your contact no longer sells, you have to go through the trouble of calling to find out who to contact if you want a specific knife.

We're lucky - since most everyone in my area knows at least one person that works for the company it's much easier to get our knives from them than it is elsewhere in the country. It's also much easier to work for Cutco in my hometown area versus here in Chicago or elsewhere just because you're so close to their headquarters and most people are absolutely willing to buy something when their sales rep comes around just because they know and trust the company. The Cutco sales rep is pretty welcome at any door in my hometown.

ETA: I guess my point is that people who work for Vector Marketing go through similar trials and tribulations as those who work for any other company that uses direct marketing and door to door sales. Not everyone is cut out for it, in fact, most people aren't, but if you like it and work very very hard (and I mean very very hard) you can make a lot of money at it. If you hate it, you're not going to work hard (because you hate it) and you're not going to be an effective sales rep to make a lot of money.