THREE SALES PER HOUR OR BUST

“I very frequently get the question: ‘What’s going to change in the next 10 years?’ And that is a very interesting question; it’s a very common one. I almost never get the question: ‘What’s not going to change in the next 10 years?’ And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two…”

- Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon

The very first formal sales training I had was when I was 16 years old. I heard about a local telemarketing company that was paying pretty good money for making phone calls. I went in to interview, read a short script and landed the job. A week of intense old-school telemarketing training followed. This training was telemarketing 101 - reciting a script, repeating standard rebuttals, displaying enthusiasm, etc.

Day one of live calling was eventful - 0 sales, and the rest of the week was much the same. We had an automated dialer that kept us on the phone non-stop. We had to be ready to start talking and selling fast. Our goal was 3 sales per HOUR!

After a few days I noticed a few things. First, people dropped like flies, after week one, half my training class was gone, but also, a new class had just come onboard. This was the highest turnover industry in existence - the odds of success were very slim. Out of a class of 15 new hires 1 or 2 would typically survive more than a month. People would either be fired for performance or quit on their own. I survived all through High School, two years, until I had to move for College.

How did I survive? What did it take to make 3 sales in hour to strangers over the phone? At the time I didn’t know that I had stumbled upon some basic universal principles of selling. I was able to take these principles, along with others that I learned throughout my career path, and use them to be a top performing sales executive numerous industries including finance, recruiting, and IT industries.

I hear often, usually by non-sales people, that selling in different industries requires a very specific set of skills, knowledge, and experience. This is simply not true. A sale is an interaction with a person. At most, several people. Being able to sell means that you can effectively communicate with a human - that’s it. And this ability is pretty common, it just requires some basic nurturing to reveal the essence of salesmanship already within you.