The Wind in My Sales

Today, I had lunch with the man who fired me. Not too many people can say that, and even fewer would admit to it. So why am I admitting to it? Well, because it was the best thing that could have happened to me. I love my current job, so, all is well now. But, a while ago, I was a salesman for a recovery firm. I think I had some overblown title such as Account Executive, or some such nonsense, offering "financial management solutions." Looking behind the curtain, you would have known that I was a telemarketer for a collections agency. Now, know this about me - I am the last person you want selling your product. Sales people are born, or hatched. You either are wired with that strand of DNA or you are not. I was not. In fact, sales people bug the bejeesus out of me. All of that handshaking and buttering up may work for the guys in the sports jackets and ties or women in their blazers and scarves, but for a ragged lump like me, I was stuck after "hello." It’s not that I performed poorly, it was that I just didn't like it. But, with the inconvenience of paying for food and a place to lay my weary coconut at the end of the day, my hand was suspiciously void of trump cards.

If you think doing collections is a tough gig, try doing sales for collections. There are a few necessary steps to take:

1. Surgically remove all traces of ego. This applies only to people not born with the gift of sales, who know no humility and have no conscience. You're a piece of meat. An easily replaceable piece of meat.

2. Develop a thick skin. It’s one thing to deal with potential customers (called "leads") who yell at you, threaten bodily harm, or just flat-out hang up on you, it is quite another to have your sales manager publicly execute you in front of your peers. When this happened, the skies rained fire, locusts swarmed around your work station, and the sound of eight pairs of horse hooves thundered through the office. It was enough to make the movie, Glengarry Glen Ross, look like an episode of the Teletubbies.

3. Sharpen your knives. You might like your co-workers. Hell, you might have a few beers with them, be their Secret Santa, or fool around with one of their sisters in the laundry room at a weekend barbecue. You probably also have one or more co-workers that you want to gun down in cold blood every time they say, "So, are you working hard or hardly working?" But, imagine having a whole office of people that you generally think you like who are thinking, "You're going down!" behind their reptilian grins. Because, folks, in the world of high-pressure sales, the strong not only survive, they are the first to rip the meat off the carcass off the sales people who are struggling. If thoughts translated to actions, a sales office would resemble a horde of machete-wielding cannibals fresh off a hunger strike.

Phone reports were kept and analyzed to see who was pulling their share of the load. I was always at the top of the list. If I was going to get bludgeoned in the morning meetings, it would not have been for lack of activity. I averaged about 120 calls a day and about five hours’ worth of actual talk time. I also averaged about two ulcers and five to ten suicide thoughts per day. Getting around secretaries who heroically screened your calls was always a good time, if you are into masochism. If you could avoid that, maybe you would have the fortune of cursing at the voice mails of your leads. Very rarely would you get to talk to a live body. It made you feel like Charlton Heston in The Omega Man, and that some catastrophic virus had leveled all of humanity outside of your office. Many a time I thought, "And here I could have been delivering pizzas." And why not? Free food and the ability to travel.

But that is how it goes in that environment. You either cut the mustard or you eat mustard sandwiches. Whenever you see a job advertisement for a sales position, it almost always trumpets, "Make up to $100 million! Be your own boss! Last year, our top sales rep made enough money to buy a South American country!" The interview process is fairly selective:

1. "Did you spell your name right on your resume?"
2. "Do you even have a resume?"
3. "How many fingers am I holding up?"

"Um, four?"

"Two. Close enough. You can start now."

And that’s it. They plug you into a computer, toss a phone book at you and say, "Go, get ‘em, Tiger!" Heads poke around corners of Herman Miller furniture to size you up and then you slowly begin to decay. When a lead finally does give out some business, you rocket out of your chair, run to the sales manager’s office like a kid who’s just lost his first tooth, take a knee, and slaughter a pig as a sacrifice to your boss. He pats you on the head, tosses you a petrified piece of hard candy, then lets you kiss his ring, before you go skulking back to the low hum of your computer. That is when you realize the business your client gave you filed for bankruptcy at the height of the Ottoman Empire and he was just trying to get you to stop bugging him. When you did land a debtor who was still in business, chances are they only owed $300. The collector who has to collect that account would take the form, fold it into an origami swan, staple it to you chest, and light it on fire.

Some agencies pay you just enough to keep you off the bread lines, saying that the real money was in the commissions. In my entire time in that office, I never saw one commission check. And it wasn't just me. The other cold-callers did not get any commission checks while I was there, either. You had to generate a certain amount of money in fees, and then you would get a certain percentage of the fees above that threshold. I might as well have been trying to juggle applesauce.

I had enough. When my boss let me go, he did me a huge favor. I could sleep late, collect unemployment, and make as many sandwiches with free government cheese as I wanted.

It went well with the mustard.

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