The other day our foreman was busy distributing a flyer when he found himself walking next to a distributor from a large, well-known competitor of ours. As they walked together, they struck up a conversation.
It turns out that he gets paid in a week what we pay our distributors in two days. After a while, he started complaining that our foreman was walking to every single post box. What you've got to do, he explained, is to skip two and only do every third post box. It cuts down on the distance, and at the same time your boss, if he checks, can see that the street was covered because he will find a flyer in a letter box here and there. If the boss finds some empty letter boxes as well, you just say that the residents must have taken out the flyer already, or that the resident was in the garden and you handed over the flyer instead of putting it in the letter box.
With our system, a distributor would never get away with something like that. Short-cuts such as the skipping of letter boxes, only doing one side of a street and turning around half-way down a street will clearly show in the GPS data that our distributors bring back to the office. That data - pinpointing every letter box visited - forms part of the report that we give to our clients.
Perhaps just as important is the fact that our distributors do not have to devise tricks such as these to survive. They are well paid, motivated, and proud of their work and their productivity.
Even though the opposition distributor was only doing every third post box, our foreman outpaced him and, as he turned the corner, he saw him way back down the street, taking a break under a tree.
It turns out that he gets paid in a week what we pay our distributors in two days. After a while, he started complaining that our foreman was walking to every single post box. What you've got to do, he explained, is to skip two and only do every third post box. It cuts down on the distance, and at the same time your boss, if he checks, can see that the street was covered because he will find a flyer in a letter box here and there. If the boss finds some empty letter boxes as well, you just say that the residents must have taken out the flyer already, or that the resident was in the garden and you handed over the flyer instead of putting it in the letter box.
With our system, a distributor would never get away with something like that. Short-cuts such as the skipping of letter boxes, only doing one side of a street and turning around half-way down a street will clearly show in the GPS data that our distributors bring back to the office. That data - pinpointing every letter box visited - forms part of the report that we give to our clients.
Perhaps just as important is the fact that our distributors do not have to devise tricks such as these to survive. They are well paid, motivated, and proud of their work and their productivity.
Even though the opposition distributor was only doing every third post box, our foreman outpaced him and, as he turned the corner, he saw him way back down the street, taking a break under a tree.
