You're Going To Be Great At This!

For a brief few months I worked as a telemarketer for a small firm owned by a young married couple. The husband was a bit of a hot head and kind of a jerk on occasion, but his wife was nice and had to put up with the guy.  One of their clients was a mobile home company that wanted people to come to the lot and see how awesome their singlewides and doublewides were. As telemarketers we offered incentives like a cooler and camera (back when they weren’t part of your phone) and other assorted giveaways. We got a small commission if we could book the client. My coworkers and I would call from a list of leads that our employers had purchased from someone. These leads were supposedly “qualified” ahead of time, meaning that they had been vetted to meet the needs of the client, the mobile home company. Unfortunately, most of the leads were useless. The people we spoke to didn’t live in the right geographical areas or their incomes were too low.  “Why aren’t you guys closing anyone?” t...

As an author of a book on sales I am asked to speak to groups of sales people. There are times, however, when I give a presentation to a civic group or some other kind of organization that isn't necessarily a sales group. For those I adapt my talk to let everyone in the audience know that they are, indeed, in sales. I will usually ask the audience who is in sales. A few hands go up. Then I ask who is not in sales and more hands are raised. That's when I break the bad news to them. They are in sales whether they think so or not. As the old adage goes, the first step is admitting you have a problem. It makes me want to put the audience's chairs in a circle and have a "sales intervention".  As discussed previously, we are all in sales in some form or fashion. Luckily,  basic sales techniques are easily transferable to other parts of our lives. Anyone who has tried to convince a coworker to try a different approach to a problem is in sales. Singles bars (are they stil...