More Psychology of Selling

[Note: This is part of a chapter from my forthcoming book “The Art of Telesales”.]

That the customer is always right has become a modern day cliché. In his seminal work, “How To Win Friends And Influence People”, Dale Carnegie stated that if you want to get people on your side you must never argue with them. This is especially so for a salesperson, but why is this? Surely the whole idea is to persuade the prospect to your way of thinking, isn’t it?

The answer is that, as salespeople, we are not trying to get people to think that we are right and that they are wrong. If this was the case we would never get a sale. The times when we do prove a potential customer wrong, we will invariably NOT get the sale. They will resent us for highlighting their folly. If this is the case, then what is our role? ...



Our role as sales people is to present our product or service in such a way that the prospect can not, reasonably, say no to us. That is all there is to it, really. We must be guides and ushers at best – or at least that is how we must be seen to be.

I remember once, when I was fairly new in sales, I was out on a corporate night out. At the time I was selling alternative supply maintenance agreements on telephone switchboards. I happened to get talking to a rather attractive lady that was not part of our company but happened to be at the same venue as us. The subject turned to what we did for a living. I mentioned what I did and she exclaimed, in delight, that she was a sales trainer for her company. Jumping at the chance to learn, I offered to give her my pitch so that she could give me some pointers. She readily agreed.

During my pitch, it turned out that she also happened to be the person in her company that made decisions regarding their switchboard. Anyway, it was not long before I had her ready to be signed up as a customer. She was just about to give me her work number so that we could sort the paperwork out the following Monday morning, when she suddenly said "Oh, weren’t you going to give me your pitch, by the way?” To which I replied, “I just did!”

That was the exact moment where our blossoming relationship and my chance at a sale ended. It seemed that she was not impressed at all by my revealing that our whole conversation had been a sales pitch. It took me a long time to work out why, but the reason is simply that it showed her up to be foolish and naïve and also not a very good sales trainer, to boot!

The moral of this story is that, contrary to popular opinion, real salespeople are not wide boy Jack-the-lad types who can beat everyone in sight with their skill at rhetoric. What we are is highly skilled manipulators. If people can see your technique then you are not delivering it correctly.

How does this transfer into an actual sales situation, then? Well, the most important place is in objection covers. If someone raises an objection, what is the first thing you should do? Do you spend the next few sentences explaining exactly why they are wrong? NO! All that would happen is that the prospect will go into ‘fight or flight’ mode. They will either end up hanging up on us or getting into a verbal brawl. Both ways we lose out, in sales terms anyway. Be constantly on guard for this. Our task is to deliver our pitch in a way so as never to prompt the ‘fight or flight’ response in our potential client.

So, given an objection, therefore, what you do, first and foremost, is this:

Agree with the objection!

I do not care whether they have just come out with the most ridiculous statement ever, (we will go into how to deal with that later). Your line is simply and almost invariably:

“I appreciate that…”

Notice how, in terms of martial arts philosophy, we are like water; we are pliable, yielding, soft and playful even, yet when the time is right we can unleash devastating power. This is the art of sales at its very core. Remember the old saying, ‘no one expects the inquisition’? That was what gave it such power; the fact that no one expected it. We must be just like this – no one expects a good salesperson because all they ever see are the bad ones. When they do come across a good one, they do not even know it because all the customer thinks is that they merely spoke to a really friendly and helpful person who helped them buy what they wanted. The prospect never knew what hit them. It is probably true to say that the greatest salespeople are like cats toying with their prey, for only when they are absolutely certain that there is no more fight left in the quarry, will they go in for the kill.

The real question, though, is how we turn them round after agreeing with them. The answer to this is revealed in my book, "The Art of Telesales".

Read More...

Telesales Book

I have received a number of requests asking where people can get copies of my forthcoming telesales book.

It is currently still in the production stages but should be ready very early in 2008. Please check back here for progress updates...

Thank you.



End of post.

Read More...

Chapter Four: The Psychology of the Sale

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 Four: The Psychology of the Sale

Too Good to be True

Has anyone ever offered you something that just seemed too good to be true? What did you do? If you are like most people you probably assumed that it WAS too good to be true and refused to have anything to do with it. This is because when they offered it to you, they failed to understand and follow the basic principles behind the psychology of the sale.



You see the thing with people, humans, is that we have only really, in evolutionary terms, just come down from the trees. Technology beyond the everyday Joe’s understanding we may have in spades, but we still have a primeval inbuilt sense that alerts us to any potential danger and we tend to follow this because it was not too long ago that if we did not heed its warning, we may well have ended up getting eaten if we were unlucky.

This inbuilt warning system constantly checks everything around us for any signs of danger. It has learned to identify anything that is new as potentially hazardous. Incidentally, this is the main reason why most people dislike change. However, we live in an advanced society now and our inner warning system sometimes holds us back when in reality we would be better going forward.


“No thank you, you might be a hungry lion!”

So what has all this got to do with sales and specifically telesales? The answer is that it has everything to do with sales but even more so with telesales. When you speak to a complete stranger on the telephone, their inner warning system is automatically in a heightened state of awareness because they do not know who you are or what you want with them. If you do not learn to manage this then all you will ever experience is a bunch of “no thank yous”. What these really are is each person’s inbuilt warning system telling them that something about your call does not seem right so let’s have nothing to do with it, thank you very much.

The problem is that most people will never tell you this and so you come away from the call none the wiser. They may say any number of things to you, (these are covered in the section on objections), but they will not tell you the truth which is that inside they have been put into fight or flight mode and so they are choosing the latter. In reality, all that happened was that the sales person neglected to reassure the prospect’s inner defence mechanism that there was no threat.


The first seven seconds

You may have heard it said that people make up their mind about you on the telephone in about seven seconds. I do not claim any empirical knowledge of this; however, it is abundantly clear that the reason behind it is the inner defence system. If we can reassure this that we pose no threat then we stand a very good chance of getting our full presentation out, which in turn, gives us the best possible chance of securing a sale.


Face to Face Sales Versus Telesales

The advantage that the face to face sales person has is that, at this stage of the process, they are only usually asking for an appointment with the potential customer. The person on the other end of the telephone, even if they have some doubts, is likely to agree to a face to face meeting if they have interest in the product because they can take advantage of the time in between the call and the meeting to research your company and check out you and the competition. Then, any doubts they still, have can be ironed out in the meeting itself.

As a telesales person, you do not have this advantage. If the prospect has any doubt at all they will have none of you. The advantage you do have though is that you have far better numbers in terms of potential chances to secure a sale than a field sales person, but that is another story.


The Sales Pyramid

So, before we learn how to handle the prospect’s defensiveness, and indeed the whole psychology of the sale, let us first look at the sales pyramid. Fig. 1 is the sales pyramid which is a model of the perfect sales call. We will return to the sales pyramid again so please take time to understand it in its simplest form.

Image to be added soon!

Fig. 1


In Fig. 1, we can see that where the Y and the X axis intersect, i.e. at the beginning of the call, there is no impulse to buy. This is obvious to almost anyone. We further see that, in the perfect model, as time progresses, the impulse to buy greatly increases until it reaches its zenith. This would be the time to close the sale, but we shall come to that later. Beyond that point, the impulse to buy starts to wane. This is one reason that many sales calls fail. If you do not close when you get the buying signals, essentially you have missed your chance and it becomes increasingly difficult to get a positive result.

That the impulse to buy subsides is not a bad thing, though. In actual fact we depend on it doing so, assuming we have closed the sale before hand, so that we may consolidate the sale properly. At this point, if you do not understand terms such as ‘consolidate the sale’, do not worry, they will be explained in due course. Simply be content with knowing that the impulse to buy will naturally rise and fall over the duration of the call.

Next let us look at what things must happen for the graph to behave in the ideal manner:


Steps to the Sale

There are certain steps that you must take in order to ensure that the prospect allows you to pitch to them. It is by understanding and following these steps that we learn to reassure the potential customer’s inner defence mechanisms that we are actually trying to help and not harm them.

We will deal with each step in turn but in brief they are:

• Rapport
o We must establish a rapport with the prospect.
• Reason
o We must establish a clear and valid reason for the call
• Credibility
o We must establish the credibility of ourselves and our company to the prospect

Another way of saying this is to say that we must establish:

i. who we are,
ii. what we want, and
iii. why the prospect should deal with us.

Ideally, if you have been given a pitch to work with, these should be part of it already, but if they are not then please ensure that you make them so.

I think at this point it is time to discuss something that is, unfortunately, a prevalent practice among many companies that employ telesales professions. That is the practice of misleading the potential client. Examples of this come in all sorts of guises but examples include being told to infer that you are calling on behalf of some official agency such as the government or the local council or any of the emergency services. In addition, you may be told to pretend that you are carrying out some form of survey or customer satisfaction to lull the potential customer into a false sense of security. Indeed, there are as many of these types of ‘blind’ as there are people to think them up.

Let me make one thing absolutely and perfectly clear. Not only do they not work, but they are actually counter productive to the sales process. Why? For exactly the same reasons I have just gone into depths explaining; namely the prospect’s inbuilt defences. Yes, you did hear that correctly, this is the exact reason that these ploys do NOT work. That may sound strange to you, especially if you currently work in a job that asks you to do one of these things. It is also true to say that it is the reason that companies ask you to say these things in the first place. They ask you to say them precisely because they are afraid that people will not want to speak to you if you tell them the truth about who you really are.

I have worked in positions where this was the case and in every one I found that I invariably sold far more than my colleagues that used the lies when I did not. Now, please, do not let me come across here as some holier than thou ‘you must always tell the truth’ type of sales person because I absolutely am not. To be brutally honest I used as much salesman’s licence as the next man. I say that these lies do not work because I have tested them time and time again against the truth and every single time found that, in the long run, you sell more and feel better about yourself by NOT misleading potential clients.


Please note that this chapter is incomplete. The remainder will be added in due course.

Read More...

Chapter Three: A Numbers Game

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 Three: A Numbers Game

Sales is a numbers game. Period. There is no getting around this fact. If you want to be successful at all in any kind of sales environment, whether it is field sales or telesales, then you simply HAVE to put the numbers in.




I was once told the story about a man that saw another man get attacked by a gang in the street. As he ran to aid the other man, he watched as the man under attack remained perfectly calm and still until one of the gang actually went to hit him. At this point he saw the man block the attack and knock two of the gang members out cold with a single spinning kick. The remaining members of the gang fled at the sight of this. As he arrived at the scene, realising that his help was in no way needed, he courteously asked whether the man was alright. When he said he was, the observer remarked what an amazing kick that had been to knock two people out in one go. To this the other fellow responded that, in actual fact he was an expert in martial arts and that, while it may have only looked like one kick to an observer, in actual fact it was the culmination of perhaps a million kicks practiced repeatedly in readiness for a moment such as this.

The moral of this story is simple. Excellence is not a single action but an overall result of many, many actions taken to perfect a skill. This is the essence of the numbers game. We all play the same game in sales, it just so happens that some are more skilled than others through practice and perhaps a little luck. Let me explain the numbers game a little more clearly:


The Basics

Suppose that if you hit your target you will earn £35,000 per annum (roughly $70,000 USD) and you need one sale per day to hit your target. Let us further suppose that to make that sale you must make ten sales presentations over the phone, on average. Further, let us assume that to enable you to make those ten presentations, you must make, again on average, one hundred individual calls to different companies. Clearly these figures will vary depending on your industry, your product and your level of skill, however, for the time being let us work with these for the sake of illustration.

We are left with the following:

100 calls per day = 10 sales presentations
10 sales presentations = 1 sale per day
1 sale per day = £35,000 per annum

Simple. Ok, but let us take this one step further. If there are 52 weeks in a year and we are allowed 20 days holiday, then we are left with 48 working weeks. If we then subtract the number of bank holidays which usually equals 8 days, we are left with 46.4 working weeks. If we then assume a further two weeks for sickness throughout the year, we are left with a grand total of 44.4 working weeks to each calendar year. This works out at 7.6 weeks of lost selling time.

So we have:

52 weeks in a year
- 4 weeks holidays
- 1.6 weeks bank holidays
- 2 weeks sickness & misc. absence

44.4 weeks selling time remaining


This may all seem like I am going a little too far but please remember that a company will generally make far more money from you and have to pay you far less money if you almost hit your targets but not quite.

Companies may say that your targets are weekly ones but that is not the case at all. Any organisation worth its salt will set its targets first of all annually and then quarterly. This is why when I worked for a very large private healthcare provider they did not allow their sales staff any leeway over missing targets due to holidays. Staff were expected to manage their holidays and their sales so that they hit their targets no matter how much time they had off.

So, let us return to our initial model. If we multiply it up a little, we see that to earn your £35,000 per annum you had to achieve one sale per day. Therefore, we can assume that what that means is that you have a target of around 260 sales per annum, (1 sale per day x 5 days per week x 52 weeks per annum).

However, in reality, your target is no longer one sale per day because now we have to divide 260 sales by 44.4 weeks and then by 5 days per week. The result of this is roughly six sales per week and so 1.2 sales per day.

This may not seem like such a big deal but what it actually means is that if you work on a basis of one sale per day and five sales per week, on average you are likely to end up short of your target at the end of the month by four sales. This is how companies screw you. If you miss your monthly target and then your quarterly and so forth, chances are that you are missing out on some pretty nice bonuses and commission incentives. The company will be delighted because you are doing what they need and they are not having to pay you very much for it.

If you are one of those cynical people that does not think that it works this way then I would urge you to check out the people that are earning big money in your organisation. I guarantee you that they will run through figures like these on a regular basis. Every single successful salesperson that I have ever met, including myself, regularly check where they are in terms of their required sales figures and how much they need to do and how many calls they need to make to achieve that.


Bean Crunching

The next step is to determine what our actual figures are. It is all well and good me saying that to get one sale you need to make on hundred calls, but what if that is not the case for you. I know that I used to work on very different figures from this indeed. I usually only needed to average around ten to fifteen calls to make a single sale. Having said that, I knew many colleagues that had to make the hundred mark to even have a chance of a sale.

The way to discover your actual statistics is to simply count them up. Start by collecting some hard data. If your company can provide you with the number of calls you have made over a given period then by all mean get them out and start doing some sums to see where you are up to. If they cannot or will not provide these then you will just have to compile them yourself.

The easiest way that I have ever found to do this is by just sticking a post-it note to your desk and making a small mark each time you make a call. The added advantage of this is that it can give you more detailed data that a simple phone bill. You can use it for example not just to record how many calls you make but also how many decision makers you speak to and how many full presentations you make. This is invaluable information for a telesales person.

By way of a slight aside here, it occurs to me that some of you may think that all this is very pedantic and merely producing figures for the sake of it. Indeed, I have been accused of this on occasion by some bosses. Yet, when they see the results I get they soon shut up about it and let me get on with it, thank you very much. The point is that one of your primary business tools is your telephone. That hunk of plastic that sits on your desk staring at you all day long can bring you great riches and happiness if you learn how to use it properly. It gives you constant feedback by way of these daily figures. Use them and be the better off for it.

Remember, even if you are the worst sales person in the world this method of selling WILL work for you. Even if it transpires that you need to make twice as many calls as your colleagues to get the same sales then what does that matter? For as long as you put in those calls, you are guaranteed, statistically speaking at least, to get those sales.

So what do you need in the way of raw data? You need several values:

• Total number of actual calls made during a specific and measured time period
• Total number of sales made during the same time period.
• Total monetary value of sales made in the period
• Total number of days worked

What you then do is simply apply the following statistical formulae:


• (Total number of sales calls) divided by (Number of days worked) = Average number of sales calls per day

• (Total monetary value of sales) divided by (Number of days worked) = Average £’s per day

• (Total number of sales) divided by (Number of days worked) = Average number of sales per day



Then simply divide the results of those, i.e. average £’s per day by the average number of sales calls per day to get the average number of £’s per call and do the same with the average number of sales to get the average number of calls needed to get a single sale. You can go on with this process depending on the depth of data that you collect. If you have information, for example about how many full pitches you managed to make and how many actual decision makers you speak to then you can calculate how many pitches you need to make to get a single sale and so forth.

The point of this should be very clear. If it transpires that you usually make around 80 calls per day and get one sale per day, it does not take a genius to realise that without improving your selling skills one little bit, you can easily make one extra sale every four days if you simply increase your daily calls average to a hundred. Or, if you are this way inclined, you could make your average of five sales per week by Thursday and then take it easy on Friday. It is up to you.

The value of knowing your work input level to sales output level in terms of statistical ratios is enormous. Everyone has a comfort level. Most sales books assume that you want to be the next Bill Gates. I do not assume that. The majority of successful sales people that I have ever met were happy earning a certain level that they had determined necessary to live the lifestyle they wanted. Obviously that figure varied from person to person, but once they had achieved that, plus a bit extra on top to ensure they had a buffer zone to protect them, they generally preferred to enjoy their lives and get to know their work colleagues or spend more time with their families than stressing out over looming sales targets. Life, in any arena, is always about balance. The value of statistics in sales is that they tell you, (on average it must be stressed), what you need to do on a daily basis in terms of your own personal level of effort to achieve your goals.

You should check your statistical averages often – perhaps once a month - and always ensure that you have the required data available to do this, in terms of numbers of calls and so on. This will also help you to determine your progress in sales. The better your averages, the higher your level of skill. When your skill level begins to increase, one of two things usually happens. Either you can do less work to achieve the same level of sales or you can achieve more sales with the same level of work as before. Which you choose will depend upon your personal motivation. Remember, although all great sales people are motivated by money, money is not the only motivation in life.

Read More...

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?

Read More...

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!

Read More...

The Art of Telesales: Introduction

This is the first 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.


In the United States, or so I have been lead to believe, as a profession, sales is held in the same high regard as other professional vocations. In the UK this is not so. Sales people are seen as only slightly more respectable than criminals, though the vast majority earn a lot less. The image is of the unscrupulous con-artist that would gladly rob their own granny of her life savings if there was a profit to be made from it.



We have the media in particular to thank for this view. Think back if you are old enough to remember the “That’s Life” program on Sunday nights on BBC1 where Esther Ranson and her team of intrepid reporters would fearlessly expose companies that were out to con people. These companies are out there and people do need protection, it is true, but the sales profession as a whole took a real beating. Add to that the images of George Cole as used car merchant ‘Arthur Daily’ in ‘Minder’ and David Jason as ‘Del Boy’ in ‘Only Fools and Horses’ and we begin to see a pattern emerging. The trend continues even today as the larger manufacturers of various goods try to convince you to buy from them instead of the local supposedly ‘less trustworthy’ operators.

So it is that we have a picture in our minds. Well, and do not underestimate the severity of this, if you think the image of the sales person is bad, think for a brief second about the poor telesales person. Not content with merely creating humorous shady but never the less lovable characters for the telesales person, the media feel the need to revile telesales in our society. We see this in almost every program where someone takes a cold call and then proceeds to rant at the nerve of the caller who was, after all only doing their job. Twenty years ago it seems that estate agents were the biggest villains around. Now it is the lowly telesales person. Indeed, if it was not for the genuine lack of anything like a half respectable job that would earn a reasonable wage in this country, I wonder that anyone would ever stoop so low as to think to become a telesales rep.

So we see a situation where people go into telesales because there are loads of jobs doing it and loads of people looking for work. They arrive in these jobs and get nothing in the way of training. This was exactly the case when I left university at a tender age, having a respectable history degree under my belt. Little did I know when I enrolled at university that my deep knowledge of historical events would prove about as attractive to employers as an understanding in trade unions strategy and labor negotiations!

Despite all this, I prospered as a sales and telesales person. I drove myself hard in the early years and underwent the trial by fire to emerge as a fully competent sales professional. It was not easy, to say the least. The purpose of this book is to enable others to experience the transition from newbie to fully fledged sales pro in as little time as possible and with minimum stress and maximum results.

I will post further chapters as and when I get the opportunity.

Please enjoy.

Read More...