Believe in better, say the Sky ads, a philosophy hard to marry with the very old-tech idea of paying salesmen to go door-to-door flogging television and broadband contracts. Door-to-door selling is what gas and electricity suppliers do, or used to do, often landing themselves in hot water with their regulator when the sales techniques proved too aggressive or plain misleading. The market leader in pay-television, you might have assumed, would wish to set a loftier tone.
Now it will – probably. BSkyB is proposing to axe all its 550 door-to-door salesmen, or "Sky Walkers", and has taken them off the streets while it conducts a consultation with employees. But this, note, is not because whistleblowers among the Sky Walkers came forward to this newspaper to allege sharp selling practices and hard-to-meet sales targets. It is because, as BSkyB explains, "as customers choose other ways to buy our products, door-to-door sales are becoming less viable". The review of door-to-door selling, apparently, was already taking place before the allegations were made.
OK, if you insist. But it's becoming harder to see why any mass-market consumer-facing business would wish to take the risk of running a commission-based door-to-door sales operation. The danger of damaging the brand is just too great.
