Chapter Two: Learning the Craft

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.


Chapter Two: Learning the Craft

I consider myself lucky that my friend from university had worked for this company and had loved it and had also done really well at it, (he had moved to another company by this time), because otherwise I would have been tempted to blame the company’s lack of instruction for my failure and just leave. Alas, I knew that I could blame no one but myself. Fortunately, and for this I shall be ever grateful to them, the company must have seen something in me beyond the results I was producing because, despite my failure to hit targets, they not only kept me on but also paid me a decent basic salary and even paid commission on the few sales I did manage to get.



It was at about this point that I determined that if the company were not going to offer the instruction that I so desperately needed, then I would have to take it upon myself get it by other means. I decided to buy a couple of decent sales books and to learn how to do this thing that was eluding me so much.

What was really difficult for me was that, throughout my entire life prior to this, I had easily been able to do pretty much everything that I set my mind to. Okay, I was never that great at team sports such a football or rugby, but I had more than made up for that in individual sports such as running and boxing. So for me to be failing at something was especially hard to take because I had not developed the tools to deal with failure up until this point. I had always had everything so easy and had never really had to try at anything before. I was determined to find a way to conquer this.


Current Telesales Books

A few trips to the library and to the large bookshops in the city quickly showed me that there was no such thing as a decent telesales instruction book. Oh, there were books about telesales alright, but they seemed to focus entirely on writing scripts and marketing techniques or using the phone in underhand ways to get a foot in the door when you next called round in person.

This was not what I needed at all. What I had to find was a book that told me how to start a conversation on the phone with a complete stranger and, by the end of that conversation, have that stranger agree to change from using their current supplier to use my company instead and further, to fax a signed order form to agree this deal. Needless to say, I found nothing that came even close.

I realised that I needed to look elsewhere. There were lots of books about field sales and so I found a book by Tom Hopkins called “How to Master the Art of Selling”. I have no shame in admitting that I am indebted to a man whom I have never met for shaping the course of my life. Without that book, I would have left sales and been doing who knows what now.

However, before you run straight out and buy that book, (I certainly would not blame you if you did), I must point out that it took me many months of studying it and interpreting its principles and teachings before they began to yield results for me. Do not misunderstand me, it was not the fault of the book, it was merely because it is a field sales book and so a good proportion of it was irrelevant to the true telesales person. Even the parts that were relevant were only so to the extent that one must extract the underlying principles.


Field Sales versus Telesales

Let me explain: Telesales, in the UK at least anyway, is very different from a typical face to face sales presentation. To begin with, most telesales people only really have one product to sell and that product is usually something that people do not need or even want. On the flip side, most face to face selling involves selling something that people either have requested, such as double glazing or an automobile or a new telephone system, or that they need anyway such as a company to build their new hospital wing or whatever. The face to face sales person will also normally have a bevy of choices of which product to offer. In consequence, traditional sales teaching focuses on a very consultative approach.

The humble telesales person has none of these advantages and often has less than seven seconds on the telephone to persuade the stranger on the other end to listen to them. Usually, telesales people find themselves selling things like mobile phone upgrades or alternative supply of utilities or insurance etc., or they may even be in the glorious position of selling advertising which is how I spent a good portion of my time on the phones.

The point is that traditional sales teaching is not really apt to this kind of position. Telesales people are driven very hard by stickler bosses that see only in terms of numbers of calls made and hours spent on the phone each day. You cannot give a telesales person an instruction book that says to research every company you call before every call. They are making around a hundred calls every day and typically will get through around a thousand leads in a month. It is not only impractical to suggest research into every individual company, but downright unthinkable.


Making it Work

The purpose of this book therefore, is to take that hardiest of person, the humble telesales soul, and give them the tools to help them succeed in an industry that is famed for not giving a damn about its greatest assets, namely its people. It took me well in excess of ten years to learn these lessons. Most of them I learned by spending hours and hours in my back garden in the late evenings, smoking myself into oblivion with stress, endlessly going over different ways of saying certain things and then practicing, the next day, on the phones what I had come up with the night before. Then, the following night, spending endless hours again analysing the results from that day and the previous days and weeks and months to see what was working and why and what was not working and why. My poor girlfriend was my constant guinea pig, though she is now my wife so it could not have been that hard on her.

Finally I saw the fruition of my labour. It was not a gradual process either. One minute it did not work and then the next minute it kicked in. I went from selling almost nothing to, in a single month in that company, selling more than anyone ever had before or ever has since. The record still stands. People have come close to it but nobody has managed to better it. I left the company about six months after that to seek another challenge of equal grandeur, (I had kind of got hooked on the challenge of breaking out of my comfort zone and becoming more than I had previously thought possible). I still occasionally call up that company. My old boss has sadly passed away but the new boss has heard of my record and every time he asks if I want to work for him. The lessons I learned during that time, and many more that I have picked up over the years, I hereby present in this manual.


Closing Thoughts

I leave this section with this final thought. In all my years working in telesales, I have frequently come across telesales people that regularly earn less than they would doing a part time job working in a fast food restaurant. In the very same companies, I have also come across people that earn well in excess of ten times the national average annual wage while selling exactly the same products to exactly the same potential buyers as their lower earning counterparts. Without doubt, the higher earners ALWAYS worked less than the lower earners and ALWAYS enjoyed their jobs more. What was the difference?