4 Lessons I Learned About Happiness From Door-to-Door Sales
If there’s one job that will teach you about the power of happiness, it’s 100% commission-based door-to-door sales.
It’s often described as an industry where only the most ballsy and sharp-tongued survive. Sure, you need some knowhow, but my solitary year trawling the streets taught me that’s not everything.
Essentially, it’s an industry which rewards happiness and punishes any sign of sorrow, self-pity or neediness. It really is this simple;
*Knock on hundreds of doors
*Speak to hundreds of people and get rejected by most of them
*Stay in a great mood for eight hours
That’ll typically find you enough customers for a commendable pay cheque.
Anything other than a fantastic attitude gets you nothing. Apart from dozens of doors slammed in your face. And a pay cheque of $0.
Needless to say, I learnt a lot about happiness having disturbed tens of thousands of people at their doorsteps. Here are the four most important lessons.
1. Happiness is infectious
Louis Armstrong was on to something when he sang: ‘When you’re smiling, the whole world smiles with you.’
The universal law of state transference says that whatever state you’re feeling, those around you feel it too.
You’ll find that when you’re on top of the world, everyone stops to listen what you have to say. They can feel your happiness transferring onto them and they naturally want to stay around that type of energy.
That’s why it was so important for everyone in our office to be positive before work. We had loud music, laughter, banter. Bad body language was punished with push-ups. It rubbed off on all the staff and ultimately onto the customers.
2. You can’t fake happiness
It’s ineffective to fake a fantastic mood.
You can smile. You can make jokes. You can wave your hands around. But if you’re not buzzing with excitement on the inside, there’s just something that’s a little off.
It’s that slight slump in your body language. The hint of forced enthusiasm in your expressions. You can’t fix it. You might feel you’re behaving exactly the same as yesterday, yet everyone else can sense this incongruence.
Once again, the law of state transference is at play. Except this time, they feel a desperate, needy energy. It’s strange and draining to be around and they’ll naturally want to get away from it.
It’s better for you to address your bad mood, stop feeling sorry for yourself, then start again from scratch.
3. Happiness requires momentum
The best salesmen knew a successful day started before the first door was even touched.
Training was unpaid but they still attended every day. They didn’t need the knowledge. They went for the momentum.
Our office had high energy, high fives, shouting, singing, silliness. Anything that got your state pumped was encouraged during morning training sessions.
Then, on the journey to our terrain, the managers would maintain the momentum of that energetic training environment until the moment that first door opened.
If that momentum remained throughout the day, it would be easy to make sales.
You can’t just crawl out of bed and be ecstatic. Often, you need to slowly inflate your state.
4. Happiness is a powerful emotion
All people really look for in life is to feel good. Nearly all of our day-to-day decisions are based on emotions not logic.
It’s why we overspend when shopping. It’s why we drink too much at the weekend. It’s why we accidentally cheat on our partners. None of these are logical choices. We just want to keep hold of good emotions in the moment.
So, if you’re bringing happiness to others, you can have a really powerful effect on their decision-making.
Customers sign contracts without any real reason to, because they enjoyed the salesperson’s company. They also reject the opportunity to save a fortune, if there’s no rapport with that salesperson.
People make decisions based on emotions – and happiness is one of the strongest emotions we want to feel.
Ultimately, the lessons I learned about this emotion were worth more than all the money I made in sales.
