Chapter One: Failing Miserably

This is part of a series of posts from my forthcoming book "The Art of Telesales". All material is copyrighted and all rights reserved. Please see "Telesales" under "Post Categories" for more in the series.


On the job training!

Many sales companies promote ”on the job training” or “full training given” in their adverts for staff. Often this means something entirely different in reality. The harsh truth of many companies is that they have a very high turnover of staff and so they will take anyone initially regardless of suitability and just hope that if they throw enough ‘muck at the wall’ then some of it will stick.



Essentially the ‘training’ that you get is limited to simply picking the job up as you go. The following is an account of how I started in telesales. My experience, though not horrendous compared to some organisations I have known, is pretty typical of the experience of most people in this business. The purpose of this is to reassure the would be telesales stars of the future that where they are at the moment is probably just the same as anywhere else they might choose to go, so rather than hunting for greener grass, simply bed down and make what you have work.

When I first got into telesales, I found myself at a company that did not teach you how to actually do the job at all. Sure, they were more than liberal with the amount of time they would employ you without you actually producing much in the way of results, but, in terms of instruction, all they did was give me a typed up script and told me to get on with it. It was pure cold calling. They gave me no leads to phone or any advice about objections or anything. The result was simply sink or swim. Unfortunately for me, for the first ten months or so, I did just that. I sank; and sank miserably.

I did not have a clue what I was doing because I did not understand anything about what I was supposed to be doing. Theoretically it looked simple enough. Just read a bunch of lines to some stranger on the phone and, with a lot of luck, hey presto, you got a sale. Well, that was certainly not the way it worked for me. There were two other guys about the same age as me working there doing the same job, (I was twenty-five at the time and just recently out of university, having attended a little later in life than most). I had shared a house with one of the people I worked with at university and indeed it was he that had pretty much got me this job. The other guy, a jolly Irish lad, had been there for a while by the time I joined but he was failing so badly it actually made me look okay.

My friend from university was very good at his job. For the life of me, I just could not see what he was doing that was any different from what I was doing. I asked him frequently and all he used to say was that he was not doing anything different and that all I needed to do was to relax and it would come to me. Well, as you can probably imagine, while he was easily exceeding his targets and I was reaching less than twenty-five per cent of mine month after month after month with no end in sight, his reassurances did not help much.

The office was a small one and apart from the three of us on telesales, there was only a secretary, the boss, and a couple of field sales guys in there. Most of the time the boss and the two field sales guys were out of the office because they were usually at appointments getting the kind of deals that seemed unreal to me. In one single deal they would generate, on average, a third of my whole monthly target and they would get at least a couple of these each and every week. It was mind boggling. I used to ask them for help too, and whether they could tell me what it was that I was doing so badly wrong that meant that I was getting nowhere. They would simply reply that, because they were not in the office much, they had not heard me on the phone enough to tell and so could not help me.

One of them did actually take some time with me one morning, as I recall. I had badgered him for weeks about helping me and finally he sat down for about twenty minutes with me. He asked me to go through my call backs. I had three of them I think. As usual they turned into either a ‘no’ or a ‘maybe’ that I had not managed to turn into a sale previously and had now compounded by getting no further on this last call.

The field sales guy just shook his head when he realised that I had only three potential sales in the pipeline and said that it really was not good enough. He called the ‘maybe’ one back straight away and within about half a minute had managed to turn it around into a sale. I was gob smacked but the worst part was that I had no idea how he had done it. He had said nothing at all that I had not already said. As I write these words now, all these years later, I am forced to laugh at what I was missing. Hopefully you will be able to laugh too. Do not worry if you cannot see the reason why he was so easily able to turn this sale around. By the time you finish this book and put the ideas into practice, you too will understand.

So there I was, utterly humiliated and feeling more dejected than I ever have I in my entire life. I was trying my little heart out to get a sale and yet failing miserably, when this guy comes along and turns one around for me in no time at all and then does not even tell me how he did it. All he said to me was “See, that’s how it’s done”; as if by some magic I would suddenly turn into Zig Zigglar or something at his very words. I just could not believe it!