Vector Marketing: Scam or legit?

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4 Responses

  1. Andrew Cuckow says:

    A company making a job look appealing and telling flat out lies or withholding vital information is totally different.
    Here are the flat out lies of Vector Marketing

    1. Earn $20/hour guaranteed:
    You get paid about $20 per one hour appointment regardless of whether or not the potential customer buys something. Sounds good right? This does not include the hours it may have taken to get this appointment or the time spent driving to the appointment which could be hours if you live in Airdrie and the client lives in Okotoks and you start driving at 4pm on Deerfoot. Also if you go three appointments without making a sale a higher ranking sales rep will accompany you on sales calls until you make a sale.

    2. Flexible schedule: As stated above you really only have the flexibility to schedule appointments, but they have tons of pump up meetings and phone jams throughout the night where they expect you to come in and call people and schedule appointments. This consumed many of my evenings and just wasn’t worth it.

    3. No cold calling: this is a stretch it depends on how you define cold calling. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines cold calling as “a telephone call soliciting business made directly to a potential customer without prior contact or without a lead”. During your first training meetings they have you draw up a list of everyone you know, narrow it down to the target market and start COLD CALLING YOUR FRIENDS. No matter how well I know someone, if they didn’t ask about Cutco and I call out of the blue to tell them about it, it’s a cold call. Your first attempts are done in the office during training and if you don’t stick to the script they shove it in your face and make you read it. At least that’s what happened to me and it was extremely uncomfortable.

    4. You will work as an independent contractor: The government has strict rules in defining an employee-employer relationship, because contractors don’t always need to pay CPP or EI and can claim a host of deductions against their income. Here are the criteria and how Vector violates each.
    Control: independent contractors have control over how they do their work. Evidence of an employee/employer relationship:
    a. payer (Vector)can scrutinize or control the work (ie. if your sales are low you must come in for more training, you must stick to the script).
    b. The worker receives direction or training on how to do the work. No brainer here folks Vector offers the training.

    Tools and equipment: the contractor pays for his own tools. This is the one aspect they follow

    Financial risk: You bear the risk of loss, this is a grey area but there are definite evidences of an employee-employer relationship;
    a. Payer (vector) is not responsible for operating costs. Part of the guaranteed $20/hour is a reimbursement for fuel or travel costs
    b. You are compensated regardless of whether or not you make a sale.
    c. Payer determines pay: They have fixed percentage commissions depending on your sales level.

    Investment: to be a contractor their must be a capital investment
    yes there is a small investment in the knives…

    Opportunity for profit/risk of loss:
    Evidence of violation: the $20 guaranteed compensation almost reduces your opportunity to have a business loss. Interestingly, their guarantee is also their undoing.

    The employee-employer relationship is frequently taken to court in class action lawsuits in the US. Vector ends up paying for the training. These rules for determining if you are an independent contractor are similar for the Canada Revenue Agency in Canada and the Internal Revenue Service in the US. If you’re really disgruntled you can take Vector to court and probably win!

    4. You will be an entrepreneur: Entrepreneurs are self motivated and hard working, which many sales people are as well. Being self motivated doesn’t make you an entrepreneur. You can be self motivated and be a cashier, it doesn’t make you an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurship is about innovation, finding a market need and filling it. Selling knives with Vector is about selling knives in a controlled way that you have no say over. You need to stick to the script and if you don’t sell they come to your appointments to make sure you’re following the script. If you found a better way to sell knives they wouldn’t let you do it. They also don’t help you learn the ropes of managing other aspects of a business such as financial and accounting, which every entrepreneur needs to know. They use the word entrepreneur because it sounds better than sales rep.

    Lots of jobs have unsavory parts to them, but many companies are transparent about it. Auditing firms have a reputation of low pay and long hours, yet accounting majors will kill each other to get a position with one. You just need to ask yourself if you are willing to work for a company that lies to and misinforms their staff and the government. Lots of these lies seems to be a failure to understand basic definitions. It could be argued that Vector doesn’t intentionally lie, but rather there comprehension of the English language is on par with most trained monkeys. Either they’re stupid or they’re liars but one thing is for sure they are not honest.

  2. Emma says:

    I left a resume with Vector at the career fair last year. The next day they called me back and left a voicemail asking to set up an interview. Before calling them back I did a quick google search of the company and found many postings that made me very uncomfortable, so I decided just to not call them back at all. They called me around 6-8 times over the next two weeks, and I returned none of their calls. What they told me at the career fair and what they really do were two totally different things!

  3. Jennifer Crawford says:

    They report that you are doing much better in sales then you are . Exploitation

  4. Rebecca M says:

    In regards to Emma, you filled out an application. Which generally exhibits an interest in the job. If you receive a call, you call them back and inform them that you are no longer interested point blank. They will keep calling simply because they believe you’re interested and they are just calling at bad times. That was your own fault, they were just trying to give you a fair chance.

    And everything in this is incorrect. Kaity Brown did a completely inaccurate, biased report. Bad journalism

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