It’s awesome that your son is working for Vector Marketing! I worked for Vector Marketing while I was in college (6 years ago) and am so glad I did. I learned a lot from the training and my overall experience made me more confident in the workforce.

Secondly I’ve always liked the honesty with Cutcos Talent Aquisition process. When candidates interview with them it is very clearly spelled out in the interview process what expectations are, what the pitfalls are, what the profit potential is, and the products they will be responsable for selling. They also take the time to talk about lead generation, and how that is accomplished to candidates who have likely never had a sales job, or at best as a retail clerk or something along those lines which is a very different beast then going and finding your customers.

I think it would be an itneresting case study to look at Talent Management and employee development programs at Cutco and the differences between their permanent (design, manufacturing, accounting, etc.) workforce and their largerly temporary sales workforce. There are clearly lessons that others could learn from a company that has done well in a difficult market for a long time, and which continues to thrive in our age of internet sales and globalization of products.