SHIT JOBS : TELEMARKETING Sales and Selling |
- SHIT JOBS : TELEMARKETING
- How do I break into software sales with a strict technical background?
- What do you guys say instead of “how are you doing today” on cold call intros?
- How do y’all feel about this job?
- How do i sell over the phone?
- Interviewing with a company that’s rumored to go bankrupt
- To people that worked at places with a toxic culture, did it end up impacting you outside of work alone as well?
- Help With Interviewing Skills
- Pharmaceutical sales - need help organizing targets already called
- Job offer advice needed!
- How to Handle Free Trial for B2B Sales (Not Self-Serve)--What to have customer sign up-front?
- Seeking guidance in new role
| Posted: 04 Mar 2018 08:18 AM PST There are two people, twelve years later, whose names, numbers and addresses I could recite for you. I still might kill them some day. You're sitting there in a tiny cubicle in a moldy beige room with acoustical tile and you're separated from a bear sized homeless man with a loud booming voice by what is basically urinal divider. You have a headset on, an old one with one foam earphone and a curly wire going into a battered phone. You are listening to a cavernous hiss. And then it beeps and your back tenses and it's showtime. "…. Hello? HELLO!!???!!!" The person on the other end of the line has been listening to silence and clicks for five seconds. They're tipped off to what you are. Because the autodialer waits for what it thinks is a human voice to connect you. The person is already pissed off. You have a dumb terminal in front of you. It's the 21st century but you have a monitor with green block letters on black from the 70's with what is putatively the person's name and address, but a lot of times it's empty or some guy who was about to get fired had put in "Harry Stiffey, 69 Cumshot Drive." "HELLO??!???" WHO IS THIS??!!??" "Good evening sir, is this Mr. Sti– uh, are you the head of the household?" "WHAT ARE YOU SELLING?" "I'm not, I'm not selling anything sir, this is DT calling on behalf of the Firefighter Charitable Organization, we're asking for your support in helping the Fi-" "PUT ME ON YOUR 'DO NOT CALL' LIST AND NEVER EVER CONTACT ME AGAIN" (slam.) And then the hiss again. Select "DNC" on your dumb terminal. "Do Not Call." As mandated by law we will mail a mimeograph of our "Do Not Call" Policy to what we think is his address and take him out of the system. Wait for the next beep. If you get five human beings in a row you're doing all right. The dialer waits until it thinks it hears a person but a lot of the time it'll give you that three tone disconnect sound ten times in a row. DOO DOO DEEEEHHHH and you have your headset turned all the way up because the fucking old ladies all gargle softly around fifty years worth of Pall Malls and they're impossible to hear except at top volume. This means the "we're sorry, the number you're calling has been disconnected" sound is like sticking your head in one of those horns that a lighthouse blows in the fog. Mark that one as a "Telco." Or you get fifteen minutes of no English. We'd call through San Francisco and some number exchanges are nothing but Chinese fresh off the boat, or Chinese who'd been here for years but never got off the boat in their minds, or Chinese who probably spoke English like they were hosting Masterpiece Theatre but had a handy excuse not to talk to us. "WEI? BING WA?" "Do you speak English, ma'am? Are you the head of household? "BING WA YA?" But these were still better than getting an actual English speaking human being who was head of household. Because they all hate you. Every single person you talk to hates you and thinks you're a piece of shit and wishes you were dead and even when they're polite you can feel it. "HELLO???!!!?? HELLO??!!?? "Good evening, this is DT calling on behalf of the Firefighter Charitable Organization, may I speak with the head of household?" "Do you know you called me DURING DINNER?" Then don't answer the phone, you fucking chump. Let the machine get it and savor your fish sticks in peace. "I'm awfully sorry to disturb you sir, but I'll only need a minute of your time. Would it be better to call back another night?" "Well, I don't know. Let me ask you something– WHAT PERCENT OF MY DONATION GOES TO THE ACTUAL CHARITY??" Stossel had fucked us, right before I got hired. Blown the lid off the whole operation. We called for police and firefighter charities, which sell boiler rooms the right to raise funds in their name. The cops in your town get ten or fifteen grand to help schools or disabled kids or whatever and the company gets eighty grand for the people who own it to buy small airplanes and strippers for wives. The cops know it's like this. But it's still more than they'd get sitting in front of Safeway selling cupcakes. And it's good PR for everyone in town to get a call telling them your friendly police force is dedicated to keeping troubled teens active playing tennis in the Police Athletic League. The company puts on a variety show, or a rodeo, or a charity basketball game or something and what you're selling is a pack of five tickets to this event for 35 bucks. You can go yourself, but, as the script says, most people opt to donate the tickets so local disadvantaged youth can attend. Lots of the word "youth" getting thrown around, so much that it becomes hard to say. Most people donate the tickets and keep the sticker they think will keep them from getting pulled over. "Well, sir, after the costs of talent for the show, lighting, renting the venue, postage, phone bills, and paying the fine people such as myself who are out here every day making these calls, there's a profit of about fifteen per cent left over that goes to the charity. We-" "I THOUGHT AS MUCH. This is a SCAM. I would like to be put on your Do Not Call list, and have a copy of your Do Not Call policy sent to me–" "Of course, sir, if you'll let me confirm your address…" "WHY ON EARTH WOULD I GIVE YOU MY ADDRESS?" Stossel had fucked us, and congress had fucked us, because like the day before I started telemarketing they passed a law mandating a Do Not Call registry. You have the legal right to be removed from a telemarketer's call list and to have proof of this mailed to you. And good old John "The Stache" Stossel had hammered this fact into the minds of every schlub in America in a series of hard hitting investigative pieces that also highlighted what a huge scam every single telemarketing charity is. We were already hated, so much so that a legislative body in America was moved to pass a law making life easier on individual human beings rather than businesses. The only time this has ever happened. We were already somewhere between the Gestapo and NAMBLA in the national esteem and suddenly this Do Not Call law gave everyone magic words to name the demon and Make It Stop. The Do Not Call request was always colored with triumph. Delivered like they'd finally tracked down the murderer of their kids and were finishing him off with a shovel to the head. Select "DNC." Wait for the beep. Meanwhile all around you loud booming voices make sales pitches. People who telemarket are not normal. The guy next to me is homeless. Lives at a campsite by the train tracks. Spends his check on bourbon and then once a week goes over the hill to San Jose to buy hookers. He's been in San Quentin, in Santa Rita; he once saw a man get his innards cut out and his gut filled with toilet paper and his still warm corpse tossed off a high catwalk to create the effect of streamers. He tells me that a Mexican ain't nothin but a high yella with an accent. That you can cry all you want in jail but don't take nothing from nobody. That the Woods shot caller in Rita ain't too hard. But he's been doing this so long that he sounds like the Frontline narrator or Walter Cronkite. The booming gravelly baritone and Ivy League diction you want the president to have. When he tells you the streetwalkers are down to fifty bucks for an around the world you can almost hear an orchestra behind him. Later he'll get arrested for shooting a man in the face with a pellet gun in a bar fight. Looking at life in prison for his record. His own mother will testify against him. He's a sweet man and does not deserve this. Down the row an Eastern Orthodox priest. Serbian extraction. He'll go into a litany of grievances against the Serbs if anything remotely germane to Serbia comes up on smoke break. The Muslims cut off our skins and used them as drums, he says. Later when Wikipedia is invented I learn that he means the Field of Blackbirds, which happened in 1389. The Croats were Nazis! We try to avoid discussing Serbia. Somehow fail, every night. Behind him a jockey-sized man with cystic acne in a purple velvet coat. Mouth like a muppet. His sales calls rambling off-script improvisations. On smoke break he reveals he was kidnapped by the CIA as a baby. Spent childhood in a prison camp where they injected him every day with LSD, into the spine. Two angels came and told him he was the orphan prince of a galaxy called Lucifer, 666 million light years away. There he vanquished evil on behalf of his subjects. Returned to help the people of Earth. Now the government was on to him. I visited his trailer once. He had a beautiful nineteen year old wife. You just have to believe in yourself. Everyone was fucked up, everyone had a drug problem or was in recovery or had a record too long and crazy for them to ever have hope of getting another job. So they had to come in night after night and listen to old people sneer that you'd called them during dinner, rack up three bucks a sale. I got good at it. My voice got deeper. I started booming from the diaphragm. Laughing off their perturbed "hello… hello's" and connecting with them. Flirt with the old women. Joke with the men. You get on a roll and you get so much confidence going that the person who faithfully watches John Stossel and is ready to give you an earful of Do Not Call just gets hypnotized. You can't fake this. You can go in with the same meter and the same pitch and the same words but there is something they can smell on you if you're not confident, if you're afraid. If you need the three bucks they'll snarl at you and slam the phone down. But you get hypnotized yourself, when you're good. You are genuinely connecting with people and gliding seamlessly into the best way you can help is with our ten-pack for three hundred fifty dollars and your voice is saying I am so good at this I don't need you to buy this, I don't want you to, I am walking out of here into a gold Rolls Royce bought three dollars at a time and it's just you and me talking on a lark here; it's no big deal. If you need something, people will never give it to you. If you are weak, people will never want to help you. People are animals, they are evil, every single thing you ever learned about compassion is a lie and when the end of this filthy soulless sewer of a world comes I will stand outside and dance in the hellfire, the small part of me that was still human was thinking. I am a lying sack of shit selling you a scam but because I sound like I don't want your money you will give it to me. When you are on that roll you could sell stickers that say "Fuck You Cop Pull Me Over" to the Chief of Police. The substance has nothing to do with it. It's in your voice. I became their top salesman. I beat homeless Cronkite and alcoholic priest and a bunch of other guys who'd been in boiler rooms all their adult lives, always for companies with three letter names: BTS productions, CBL productions. Selling the chance to send five retarded kids to the Vaudeville Variety Follies in Oregon and Texas and Arizona. I locked on to something and walked in knowing I would kill and so I did. A woman gave a thousand dollars because she was mad at her husband and I was a man to talk to. A man started out screaming at me out for screwing real charities out of money and when I gave him the voice he calmed down and bought. The old codgers showed me respect. I started to think of myself as a salesman. I can close anything, anyone, I thought. Then some girl would ask "what do you do" in a bar and I would cringe. This was before I knew how to lie to girls. "I'm a telemarketer," I would say. "Oh fuck, I hate you guys." No matter how good you are most of them hate you. Once in a while one of them will get through to whatever tender spot you have left. There are still two people, twelve years later, whose names, numbers and addresses I could recite for you. I've taken care to remember because I still might kill them some day. Do you know what a waste of a human life you are, one of them told me. At the time I didn't. I've since been briefed. No matter how good you are, and even if you act like a human being to them, every night there are enough of them being cruel to make you cry. I could stay on the phone with you and make you kill yourself, you think. Or at least tell you to go fuck yourself. But the boss was very clear. They can say these things. You can't. That's what a job is. They can say you're a waste of life and you can't say fuck off. If you have a soul, there's a vessel inside of you that gets filled up with the hate you take in. About a year in it hit the meniscus and I had to quit. I got a job selling ads for a newspaper. The same shit, really, but I was dialing the phone with my own fingers and could tell girls I worked for something they'd heard of. I remember the lessons that job taught me. Because there are only two jobs in the world: making shit and selling shit. Every white collar job I've had since is selling shit. Pick up the phone and ask people for money. Whether they give it depends on what's in your voice. What's in your voice depends on if the last guy gave you money. The world rewards hustlers and liars. People are cruel to the weak whenever there's a chance. Then they roll over mesmerized for anyone who doesn't give a fuck. People will trip over themselves to give you anything, as long as you don't need it. As long as they're not helping you. Human beings are essentially, irredeemably evil. Every nice thing you've ever felt is a flaming crock of shit. If God were righteous we'd have been destroyed long ago. He must instead be an alien mouth who feeds on suffering. On the plus side they had free doughnuts on Saturdays. [link] [comments]  |
| How do I break into software sales with a strict technical background? Posted: 04 Mar 2018 12:08 PM PST Hello, I have always been in technology from the programming side, but now I am trying to break into software sales. I am still young (f27) and have about 4 years of IT/programming under my belt. I have the ability to talk code but also have an extroverted personality. The catch is I have no sales background...... Any advice helps! Thanks in advance. [link] [comments]  |
| What do you guys say instead of “how are you doing today” on cold call intros? Posted: 04 Mar 2018 11:49 AM PST Looking to switch things up. I've noticed that saying this comes off as salesy right off the bat to certain prospects, and I'm definitely tired of asking if everyday anyways. [link] [comments]  |
| How do y’all feel about this job? Posted: 04 Mar 2018 08:13 AM PST I graduate in May and I am probably going to get a D2D sales job. It's 25K + commission with full benefits, car reimbursement and ability to live in the surrounding area as I don't have to work in the city the job is in. 25K is barely enough to live on where I live FYI. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 04 Mar 2018 12:57 AM PST I am looking for some tips to telemarketing. I just started a job as a telemarketer. I compare energy suppliers with each other and try to transfer the people i have on the phone to another supplier. I could really use some tips! All help is appreciated [link] [comments]  |
| Interviewing with a company that’s rumored to go bankrupt Posted: 03 Mar 2018 03:44 PM PST Hello Guys, I am in the middle stages of the interview process for a company that based on what I was reading online is about to file for bankruptcy, This is very confusing. I am very interested in the position but I think about the future, how am I going to know if they are going to go out of business? And how come they are hiring more people to begin with if they are struggling to take care of they debt? I need some help here. Can you Guys share your expertise and advise me what to do, what to investigate? Should I ask the hiring managers about the bankruptcy situation? Should I still consider joining the company after all this noise? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 03 Mar 2018 09:06 PM PST Especially to those working in younger companies. Already told the story many times on here about my racist, sexist, bigoted, and psycho Hispanic boss who has singled me out countless times for being the only white guy on the team. The worst part about our team culture is how they try to make everyone so "close" with each other by bringing on the whole culture BS. What this means is if you don't hang out with some of the team members on weekends when it is someone's party or an event going on, you are seen in a bad light and called out for it in team meetings. I have had coworkers forcefully try to probe into my personal life to the point where I cannot take PTO without being asked many times why I am taking PTO, absolutely no sense of privacy outside of work on the team. Actively looking elsewhere for other opportunities, promising news has most definitely come so I cannot wait to move on. The issue is I feel like this job has literally sucked the soul out of me. I do not go out to explore the nightlife in the city like I used to and I am not as social as I used to be either. Luckily I have friends from college I hang with who are keeping me sane but the countless hours spent on talking about how racist white men are and gossiping about others working at the company, truly a toxic work atmosphere. But I wonder if it is possible for a workplace to get so toxic to where the atmosphere impacts you outside of the workplace itself. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 03 Mar 2018 09:49 PM PST Recently been finding a block in my career. I can get interviews (public cos, startups in different cities, small cos etc GOOD jobs), but I can't seem to get an actual offer. I'm trying to figure out what I'm doing wrong -- I'm good at sales, but I can't seem to nail down these interviews. Is it common to go through multiple interviews for these 100k+ tech sales jobs? Am I a bad interviewer setting off red flags or is the competition for these jobs just that high? (1-2 years exp) any feedback would be awesome. [link] [comments]  |
| Pharmaceutical sales - need help organizing targets already called Posted: 03 Mar 2018 06:53 PM PST Hello, So I recently started in pharmaceutical sales, and I've been given a target list covering what I and others would consider quite a large territory. A lot of the time, I'm calling GI specialists that aren't always in, so I'm revisiting a lot (My job is basically showing up at docs offices and dropping off samples and getting a signature - If I dont get a sig from the doctor im not credited with a call). For some reference info, we use veeva on the salesforce CRM to get signatures as well as organize all the doctors on the list. There are over 200 doctors in this list, and I need to be visiting each of these locations over the coming weeks to drop off samples. I'm a visual person, so I think mapping everything would keep me organized on who i've visited and who i haven't yet visited. So my question is this: Is there some kind of software or mapping tool (Or even something on my own CRM that I'm not aware of) that I can use to map all the doctors as bubbles/dots - Let's say the ones that have not been visited are blue dots/bubbles on the map - and green dots are doctors that I have visited. So as i make visits and go through the cycle i slowly convert the blue dots to green dots at the end of each work day. I think a tool like this would help me a lot, so I'm wondering if there's any. Thank you in advance! [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 03 Mar 2018 01:23 PM PST Hello r/sales. After attending a recent career fair I've received my first sales job offer at a Roofing Contractor business that specializes in storm damage. They are offering 35-40k base pay plus commission and company vehicle. This is mostly door to door B2C sales and traveling to storm areas for extended periods. I love the level of autonomy they grant but hate the canned lines they expect me to deliver. As a Biology major with a year of sales experience I would love to break into Medical Device sales in the future. Will taking this job hold me back? What is door to door or roofing sales really like? Is B2C considered a step down from B2B sales? Any input would be super helpful. [link] [comments]  |
| How to Handle Free Trial for B2B Sales (Not Self-Serve)--What to have customer sign up-front? Posted: 03 Mar 2018 01:49 PM PST Hi everyone, working for a B2B SAAS startup selling to companies with >500 people. We don't do self-serve--every customer is engaged with via email, demos, followup meetings, etc. We have several prospects who are very interested and because we don't have any customers yet, we offered them a several month free trial to reduce the risk, which the customers liked. We have followup meetings soon to get started with the pilot. I'm wondering what we should have the customer's sign or agree to at this stage? Obviously we want the free trial to start as easily as possible and not put up any roadblocks, but we'd also like to convert them to paying customers with as little trouble later as possible. Should I give them a work order with terms of use now that says "2 months will be free and then upon the start of Month 3, it shall cost $x/month? Or just not have them sign anything and give them a work order at start of Month 3? I have discussed the price with the prospect and he said he was fine with it, so it won't be a total surprise. My worry is that if I give a contract now, we may get bogged down getting sent to legal, lose momentum, etc. Just wondering: should I have them sign a contract now and lock them in for paying after the trial without requiring further discussion then or just get users started and deal with it later. These are very busy customers, so I'd like to avoid having to schedule a meeting in Month 3 if everything is going fine (this may take a long time to schedule)--I'd like the paid period to just start automatically. If I don't give them a work order/terms of use, I suppose I could just have the terms of use/privacy policy be in our app when they login. Not sure what to do! EDIT: Thank you for the comments. In this case I promised two potential clients a free trial of a few months, so I'm stuck with that for them. Our setup is pretty easy so that's fine. I'm not worried about them balking at the price, I guess my real question is whether I should give them a work order now that says 2 months free and the price with accompanying terms of use or just not have them sign anything upfront? I'm worried about them getting bogged down with a contract that gets sent to legal and delays our launch by months as the lawyers hold it up and requiring them to sign or something. Is there some way I could handle it if I did want them to agree to price, like send a work order with price but not have any terms of use on it and say "terms are included on terms of service and privacy policy on the website?" so they don't have to sign anything upfront? Thanks a ton for your help. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 03 Mar 2018 01:03 PM PST Hey folks, just hoping I can get a few pointers with my new position. I feel a little in over my head at the moment. Some background:
It's day 2 and I've got emails from customers that are starting to build requesting lengthy quotes. I want to keep the existing customers happy or I could lose their business. But I've got quotes to fill and I haven't even introduced myself to a single client. I'm grateful that I received an existing client base and I don't have to go through the process of procuring new business, but I'm a bit nervous... How do I avoid drowning here? Are there any general tips or guidance anyone can give me? I already plan on staying late until I get my feet on the ground if I need to. [link] [comments]  |
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