Working Mk. II - Telesales

---

Media telesales... What is the first thing that springs to mind? A busy sales office, a large room filled with stereotypical, headphone clad people reading off scripts in a quite nonchalant manner. Well, this was my impression of what it would be however I was pleasantly and in some ways unpleasantly surprised, that it wasn't. I found myself working for a paper who was recruiting for telesales people to help sell advertising space. At first I thought, I've heard some awful things about telesales, the stress, the unfriendly customers (due to cold calling which, for those unfamiliar with the jargon, is simply calling people at all times in the day without any prior consent and then trying to sell something to someone who is not expecting, looking for it nor is happy about you calling - hence the "cold" side of the calling) and the general pressure of sales however, as a naturally over-confident and over-talkative person, I thought I could handle it and certainly with sales being in the highest earners sector - there was good money to make.

So I took the job a while back and when I arrived I was a bit taken back - apart from one amusingly hulking man in the corner at a tiny desk speaking on a phone which was clearly far too small for his hand, it was disappointingly 2 rooms with about 10 desks each and littered with newspapers being flicked through by a myriad of women. Now, I have no problem working with a large number of women, however it is a bit hard to fit in when the general discussion was regarding the events of lasts nights Eastenders/Neighbours and what Jordan got up to in Heat! magazine. I know this sounds horribly cliché and I have never been one to take clichés seriously however this was literally the picture of female office clichés - the only thing missing was a diet coke machine in the corner of the room!

After getting over the lack of Y chromosomes in the building, I decided to try to get stuck into the job. At first all I was to do was to observe however, I quickly came to realise this was not exactly what I had previously thought. The general procedure of the office was to flick through every paper in the counties you covered and scan it for every advert/ piece of marketing/ recruitment add and phone them up asking whether they would instead like to advertise in our paper. After being there for less than a day, I found a few large flaws with this, i'll lay it out so it follows:
1) The paper had a small print of 50,000 - for which I was told NEVER to say a 'distribution' as we can't guarantee how many would be published. (at which I couldn't help but wonder if it was legal).
2) The paper delivered to my county which, alone, had a population of roughly 813,000 people.
3) The paper also covered 2 other similarly large counties.
4) The paper had just re-invented itself as it had failed in one county and so switched to another one which was far away and had no affiliation to where the paper most sold.
5) The paper was a random, scattered distribution so people had no way of tracking the paper down as it wasn't even available in stores.
6) I had lived in my county almost all my life yet I had never once heard or seen this paper.
7) The paper charged outrageous amounts compared to the other local papers which would charge much cheaper and in block bookings meaning they saved even more.

Is anyone else starting to see the major flaw with a system like this? After less than a day, I marveled at how any money could possibly be made. However, in the days following, I realised there are many 'tricks of the trade' which were commonly utilised which I struggled with personally. For example, if we were covering the 3 counties - X, Y and Z, and county Z is nowhere within the county of my possible customer who lives in county X, then I would simply say we are the X and Y advertiser as opposed to the X, Y and Z advertiser as then it looks like the paper is more local and the 50,000 (roughly) prints will be more focused than they really are. Or another trick that was employed, to my great surprise, was our ever present late deadline and super-special-awesome-saver offers. For example, you would call someone and then start off with your stats about the paper and then you would wrap up by saying something along the lines of "due to a late print run/deadline, we have some late space available and so normally the rate card costage would be about £650 but I can drop this down to £215 for you". As if this would convince anyone?! If anything, it simply made us look more dubious. The prices weren't even fair, someone could get a half page in colour in the much more reputable, well known and much larger delivered paper for a couple weeks at less than £100 whereas we had the audacity (from what reputation I don't know) to try to charge people £215 for 1 week. No one in their right mind would be convinced to buy ad space from an unknown paper, with low print at sky high prices. This was my initial thought however I was wrong in all honesty.

As I watched some of the senior sales ladies (senior in the sense they are experienced) I realised it is possible to make sales; from those who have no knowledge of advertising essentially. Schools were a prime target for this, it was start of school term, lots of advertising and recruiting of potential students and students deciding where to apply for 11+ exams - this made us seem attractive when we threw around made up jargon such as "Education feature" which isn't a feature at all, its the same as any other add or boasted about how we had other private tutors and schools (which in truth we did but only in very small numbers and certainly not comparable to any local papers). Sometimes schools would be content with their current advertising, at other times they would lack the budget and at other times they simply didn't fall for the verbal assault of the sales pitch and for some reason this was met with hostility by the sales people around me saying "what is their problem" or "why won't they buy *insert swear and cursing here* ". This really confused me, its no problem and neither is it a necessity for someone to buy ad space, it is neither rude and it is in most cases sensible. So why declined offers were met with hostility, I couldn't understand - perhaps when someone hangs up on you, you may have a right to get annoyed however cold calling someone isn't exactly something anyone likes.

After about 4 and a half days in that environment I just couldn't keep my head above the water, it was far too stressful - the constant barking to get on the phones, the gossip around me, the lack of sales (on my 3rd day I managed to sell £41 worth of ad space and I must confess it was hugely lucky as I was hardly bothered by this point) and the pressure. I was expected to be selling £100 of ad space every day and by the end of the month I was supposed to be expected to sell £1,000 worth of ads in the week. How on God's green earth one does this, I'll never know. It seemed as if the paper I worked for (there were multiple papers in the building all under 1 media company) was particularly poor and, again for reasons I can't comprehend, the money that you don't sell is added onto the next week of expected sales but surely its common sense that if you can't even pull the weeks sales, then you can't pull extra on top of that? So I gave in my resignation, they let me go without notice as there seems to be an almost unspoken "revolving door" concept within telesales, where people come in and out almost continuously - why, in the 4 days that I was there about 8 new staff came and left. So I would say I lasted a decent run!

That would conclude the second job of my just started gap year. I can only say it was the longest and most pointless 4 days I have ever spent and I can firmly say I would never work in telesales again, well, not advertising paper telesales anyway! And already I am invested into another one - this time, care work with people of elderly or disabled state. This seems like a much more challenging and rewarding job which I look forward to trying. I shall keep posting on it when I start and get going!

---

Photos

Telesales in a nutshell
This picture is pretty realistic to be honest...