Let’s face it: sales can be intimidating. When I first picked up the phone as a 16 year telemarketer and called my first client, I felt like I was going to die of a panic attack. If my desire to make money so that I could become a debt-free University graduate was not there as a motivator, I might have taken the easy way.
….
I might have quit.
Well, I stuck to it and I was fortunate to have two great teachers who sat beside and — Rohit Sharma and Anjit (last name?).
Lesson 1: Mentors are crucial. Learn from the best and Model/Reverse-Engineer Them. I studied my mentors thoroughly and incorporated many of the things I thought they "incredible" at into my phone calls. After two months of working there, I was ranked #2 out of 100 employees for Quality score–where my phone calls where monitored for quality compliance as we sold insurance–and was in the top 5 sales performers.
Lesson 2: Measure it–what you measure can be improved. I soon made it to #1 for quality, which stuck for several months as I just asked quality controllers what it took to get a #1 score.
After finding a better paying face to face sales job with an outsourced sales firm selling home for service on behalf of Rogers Telecom, my fear of selling and essentially SCREWING UP in front of a customer crept back in.
Face-to-face felt twice as scary because if I messed up, I’d be putting myself on the line and have the person I was speaking to see it for themselves. For the first 3-5 days of selling face to face, I felt like absolute crap each day. I’d work 10 hour days and make $0 unless I performed. It was PURE COMMISSION. This scared many people away. In fact, we had about a 75% turnover rate at our office in Hamilton, Ontario due to the high stress nature of the job. About 50% of people who joined quit within 7 days.
I grew to love the challenge because the upside was huge. I idolized the top performers at out our office and how they could pull in a cool $1000/week. "How awesome is that?" I want to pull my first $1000 week.
Side note: Face to face sales is far more impressive than phone sales because you have to have more than just a great voice and ability to lead a conversation. I was absolutely amazed when I had my manager at the time, Scott, make 6 sales * $35/sale = $210/day on my first day of training after bantering with customers, building rapport, and making statements to middle-aged woman like, "How’s it going? Is your mom or day home?" He kept it nice and playful.
Scott’s style was fantastic and was quite different from my super-professional, rigid style I became so accustomed to.
Lesson 3: Learn Your Winning Style. After persisting for two weeks, and publicly announcing that I wanted to earn 6 sales/day to get $1000 weeks, I finally did it by week 3. I went out in the "field" with the top performers and learned the tricks of the trade.
What was my style? I’d be humorous at first to show I wasn’t a mindless drone, but immediately I’d describe the unique selling proposition and believe 100% that every person I spoke to needed to change their phone service. I told them that too. As a joke, if someone said no, I’d say, "No one has ever said that to me before" with a deadpan face…haha Sometimes it worked and sometimes it was good for a laugh, but I truly felt that way.
I literally believed I had one of the highest stress jobs in the world. The cold approach was scary. I got over it when a huge carrot was dangled in front of my face in early June 2005….
The Top 5 salespeople in the nation would be flown to California on an all-expense paid trip to meet with some big direct name marketers along with $500US spending cash (when the US$ was somewhat important…*SHAKES FIST*).
So, I took action because I wanted the prize. I was not the #1 performer but I was up there. Scott (again, my manager) took me out for lunch one day and we had a recap of my progress to see where I could improve. Together, Scott and I wrote down a set of 5 or more goals. We wrote about 3 together and I filled out the rest in private.
I set out unusually high goals that I believe were unattainable. Some of them include:
– # 1 in sales in Canada
– winning the trip to California
– being promoted to a leadership position
– making over $1000/week and more….
Lesson 4: Write Down Your Goals. Announce It to the World and Get Passionate About It. We had a custom at the office where we announced our daily goals. I used to joke around say with suspense and a pause, "Today. My goal is….to have a fantastic lunch. Success follows a great lunch." I was not entirely kidding. Eating a great lunch as opposed to junk food did make me feel better throughout the day.
Back to the point…I began announcing my goals and I truly meant them. I told everyone that I wanted to become #1. I suspect some people were afraid to make that goal public because they didn’t want to publicly fail. I felt that either way, my performance was going to be put in a public spotlight during the course of the month long competition, so I decided to go for it and make myself proud. I wanted an accomplishment that I could look back to and be proud that I accomplished what I started with no regrets.
Lesson 5: Don’t Lose Focus. On that thought….stay tuned for part 2. I’m not going to pretend I intentionally planned to stop here. I just don’t want to write this much in a day as I want to get back to a project…also known as FOCUS.
Stay tuned for part 2 where I tell you how I put my performance on steroids during the course of the competition (without injecting anything into myself or dealing with, ahem, shrinkage). Thanks for reading.