Sunday, August 09, 2009

Sale of my books

An unemployed person posted a question - can he sell my books and earn a commission. If you are interested, send an email to kinlian@gmail.com.

It is quite easy to sell my books. I sold 10 copies during my trip to Batam, just by showing people how to solve the shapes in the Shape Quiz book.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

I thought you are against people earning a commission and prefer to bypass the middleman.

Tan Kin Lian said...

I believe that salesmen should earn a fair amount of commission. If you sell my books for $7.90, how much can you earn?

If you are a "financial adviser" and sell a life insurance policy, you can earn (say) $2,000 (taken from the poor policyholder's savings - and not disclosed to him or her).

I think that a financial adviser should earn $300 to sell a life insurance policy, and not $2,000.

Let us earn an honest living by giving good value to our customers. Do not cheat people.

Anonymous said...

How much a salesperson should be earning is quite subjective as it depends on the value that the client is getting. It is like stock, you pay the stock price but get value. If the fair value of the stock is above the stock price, it is a good buy and is considered under value.

Similarly, how much a salesperson earns depend on the value he or she provides. If just selling your books without anything else, there is no value for the customer to buy from this person. They will be better off buying from you directly.

On the other hand, if the salesperson spent time teaching customers how to use your books, these salesperson deserved to be paid a commission.

Similarly for insurance salespersons. To say the fair commission for an FA is $300 for a $2000 premium is too simplistic. If the FA spent 40 hours on the case, even $2000 of commissionis too low of a price. On the other hand, if the FA just spent his time outside the bus interchange trying to con his customers, not only he doesn't deserve a single cent but should be brought to jail.

BTW, how much commissions the customer is paying for a life policy is disclosed under the Total distribution cost.

Anonymous said...

Hello REX comments as follows.
Mr Tan, i think you opened a can of worms.
"How much commission should one get?"... hmm

Let me quote another crazy example, i think it is ridiculous that housing agents commissions are typically , 1% of sale price when they are doing the same amount of work selling a $300,000 house or a $2,000,000 house.

It is ridiculous, the agent spent the same advertising efforts, spent the same incidental costs to advertise and sell whether the cheaper house or the expensive house, but in one case he pocket $3,000 in the other case he pocket $20,000. Maybe the only difference is the agent has to wear a tie and put a Prada jacket selling the $3m house... that's the only extra incidental costs....

I don't understand at all, but this is allowed in Singpaore. There are numerous examples in other areas too i think, it is the law of the jungle!! There should be some regulation to relate commissions to the efforts put in, not just the sale price. But this is controversial, a can of worms as i said... lol.

REX

Anonymous said...

To anonymous-August 10, 2009 1:05 PM
1. What are the percentage of your clients in which you need to spend 40 hrs per round of review? Or for that matter 20 hrs per round of review? (Even at 3 hrs/session, it would be more than 6 sessions!)

2. What is the percentage of time analysing/finding out the clients' needs versus the time "convincing" the client to buy the product you recommend?

3. What's the amount of time you spend explaining the limitations and drawbacks of your recomendations to you clients?

4. Is the effect of reduction in yield being clearly explained to clients in terms of dollar returns at the end of a 10-yr, 20-yr, 30-yr period?

Tan Kin Lian said...

If the insurance agent earns $1,000 by selling a policy, he can afford to spend 40 hours to convince the client. If he or she earns $100 per policy, he will find a way to sell the policy in 4 hours. I think that $100 to $300 is a fair amount to sell a policy - not $1,000.

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