Goals (Not The Kind You Score In Soccer)

Disclaimer: At some point in writing this, I ended up making it sound like college essay. Sorry.

The linearity of goals is beautiful. In them, we have a start point, an end point, and some action in between. At the National Sales Center, we are encouraged to set hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, bimonthly, trimonthly, yearly, one-yearly, two-yearly, five-yearly and twenty-yearly goals for ourselves. Examples of short-term goals are: Make 100 Phone Calls Today, Be the First Person to Make a Sale Today, Be the First Person at the Office Every Day This Week. Examples of long-term goals are: Be One of the Top 5 in Revenue at the Training Program, Get Hired By An MLS Team, Get A Promotion Within 2 Years, Become Chief Ticketing Officer in 10 years. It’s so simple. Set a goal and meet it. 

I think there are 3 types of goals. The first type is motivational. The second type is quantifiable. The third, and least utilized one, is emotional.

Remember how often we were told to “be the best that we can be”? Goals like these are what I’m calling motivational goals. They are ideals to be reached for, but with the understanding that not everyone can achieve them. Aspiring actors move to Los Angeles or New York with the goal of making a living through their skills and charisma, but not all succeed. And everyone knows that. In terms of this training program, motivational goals are ones that classify you against the rest of the group. The problem here is that each person’s goals are not mutually exclusive. We can’t ALL be the person that makes today’s first sale. We can’t all be in the top 5 for revenue brought in. We can’t ALL be the CEO of one company. Essentially, we set these goals to remind ourselves of what the highest attainment could be. Motivational goals aren’t created to be checked off a piece of paper labeled “Goals”, but to serve as reminders of what we ideally. They make us feel good afterwards if we meet them.

If I aim to make 100 phone calls in one day, workout for an hour each day of the week, or practice the Macarena for 15 minutes every morning, I am trying to achieve a quantifiable goal. Quantifiable goals are perfect for putting on a list to be checked off once completed. They are great for pushing yourself during a period of time (day, week, month, etc.), but don’t make you feel terrible when not reached, since, after all, you chose them yourself. Here are the problems with quantifiable goals. First, you can pick numbers that are too high or too low. For instance, setting the goal of making 1 sales call a day is pretty stupid. So is setting a goal of making 2000 sales calls a day. These are extremes, but it’s sometimes hard to gauge what the number should be for certain goals. Another problem arises when the number we chose is too high and we end up using all of our resources to achieve it, losing all perspective in the process. If I want to make 100 phone calls in one day, I can certainly go ahead and do that, but at what cost? The benefits of hitting this perfectly arbitrary number are an increased likelihood of making a sale (since each call has a chance of becoming a sale), but the cost is not thinking about the larger picture and losing focus of what I’m here to do, which is to learn from my mistakes and soak in the process and art of selling. I may also cut off potential buyers for the sole purpose of making 100 calls, which doesn’t seem like a smart decision.

I made two goals for myself this past week, the first of which was to make 100 sales calls each work day, and the was to smile whenever I felt the urge to smash the phone receiver into my computer. The second goal is an emotional one, the kind I am striving to add more of. Each day in sales, the one thing you can totally control is yourself and your reactions to different situations. The highs are truly high, and the lows are pretty damn sucky, and a ton of things will bother you every day if you let them. Creating emotional goals are a way of curbing emotions like anger, spite, resentment, angst, disinterest, and, less obviously, unchecked ebullience and braggadocio. These are the real emotions we all experience that negatively impact ourselves and those around us. Setting goals to mitigate these seem like the right ones, but I don’t set them for myself nearly enough. I doubt you do either.

Even after scrutinizing each kind of goal, I don’t plan to change much about how I create them. All 3 categories of goals are useful in one way or another, even if they are impossible to always achieve or are created using a completely arbitrary round number. What I do hope to do is add more emotional goals to my daily routine. Look at these additions to the weekly list: Take A Deep Breath Before You Judge Someone, Encourage Someone Who Is Obviously Struggling Through The Day, and Listen To People, Even When You Have Something To Say. Don’t these goals seem worthy of pursuit?

The state with the most Major League Soccer teams is California, which is home to the Los Angeles Galaxy, Chivas USA and the San Jose Earthquakes. 

The Past 2 Weeks

    My first call was terrifying, my worst call almost made me cry, and my first sale was exhilarating. The emotions experienced in one day in sales exceed anything I’ve ever been a part of before (excluding, perhaps, the liveliest games of poker I’ve ever played in.) It’s a mixture of crazy, brutal and awesome all put into a blender and set to “high”. Adrenaline smoothie, anyone?

                Each week we sell for a different MLS team, and each day we spend 3 to 6 hours making phone calls to people who recently attended one of the team’s home games. Of course, it’s never that simple. About 5 of 6 calls result in answering machines, and another 1 out of 3 result in conversations that last less than 1 minute (“Sorry, I’m not interested.” *Click*.) For those of you keeping track at home, that’s 1 of 9 calls in which the person on the other end of the line is willing to chat. Of these people, 1 out of 5 is not the person that went to the game, and 1 out of every 2 people that did go to the game seems to have undergone some post-soccer match brain surgery that left them only able to speak in one syllable words. Again, if you’re keeping track at home, that means that only 2 out of 45 calls are with people that show genuine interest. Of them, about 1 in 5 actually likes what you have to say so much that they’ll consider buying right away. The final result? About 1 out of 112 people might buy tickets on the phone. The key word here is might. You see where I’m going with this, don’t you?

                So each day for a couple of hours, all 16 of us power through our calls, hoping to find diamonds in the rough, needles in haystacks, Waldo from Where’s Waldo, or just someone with the right mix of friendliness, time and patience to listen. Every once in a while you come across someone looking for exactly what you have to offer, and, wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles… It’s a sale!

We began the week before last with the knowledge that we would be selling for the Los Angeles Galaxy. For those uninitiated, the Galaxy won the MLS Championship last year and have on their roster the likes of David Beckham and Landon Donovan, possibly the 2 biggest names in American soccer. Having the Galaxy as our first team was both a blessing and a curse, the blessing being that people in the LA metro area were genuinely interested in the team, the curse being that this was our first time selling by phone and our inexperience was sure to show. I think the pure excitement of starting our sales journey made this particular week fly by. Just like with anything newly learned, the first obvious progress is electrifying. But of course the learning curve flattens out soon afterwards, and we learned this the hard way the following week.

The city of Vancouver was our target during the second week of sales (remember, the first week in Minnesota was only training, so although selling for Vancouver was our third week total, it was only our second week of sales.) The Whitecaps entered Major League Soccer at the start of the 2011 season as one of two expansion teams (the other being the Portland Timbers.) Vancouver is home to only the Canucks (NHL) and BC Lions (Canadian Football) in terms of professional sports competition, giving us what we thought was a nice edge. The Whitecaps were fresh and interesting, and I figured Canadians to be too nice to hang up the phone. Although I was right in my niceness prediction, the entire crew of trainees was feeling the effects of a very difficult week by the time Friday evening rolled around. A couple of factors led to the steep drop in ticket sales and morale, but the point is that this week saw everyone in very low spirits, some people even seeming to hit a breaking point, me almost being one of them. I even stooped so low as to make an entire sales call with a British accent just out of boredom and despondency. It went pretty well. Needless to say, the elderly lady on the other end of the line didn’t purchase from the British bloke on the other end of the line.

During the second week of sales (Whitecaps), a pattern emerged in my cold calling. When selling for the Galaxy, I was nervous about stumbling and sounding stupid on every call, but after a couple hundred calls and a change of teams, I began to get nervous only after the other person made it clear that they were vaguely interested. It seems counterintuitive, but only when someone shows interest in buying does the pressure to “close” start to mount. Once a person shows interest, it’s my job to make the sale. The pressure evolves from a hard, motionless cocoon into a furiously flapping butterfly in the pit of my stomach in a matter of seconds. 

This week marks our third of selling, and the Chicago Fire are next in line. The team missed the playoffs last year and is in a sports market that is entrenched in their mainstays, namely the Bears, Bulls, Cubs, White Sox and Blackhawks. Is there room for a professional soccer team? We’ll soon find out…

My Office

     The Office, as we like to call it, is home to some of the most gut-wrenchingly funny, excruciatingly embarrassing, and unmistakably demoralizing situations known to man. It contains the highest highs and the lowest lows. The room is configured to allow for privacy, but only when it is truly desired. It’s way easier to yell across the room at someone than to hide from someone yelling across the room at you. Its openness compares to that of a sports locker room. Each person has his or her private space, but, in reality, nothing at all is private. 

  

Fig. 1: View From the The Directors' Offices    

     The room is heavily adorned with MLS team gear. From the cardboard cutouts of team logos on the walls to supporter’s scarves hanging from the light fixtures to the team jerseys lined up along a heating pipe, the room yearns to have a vibrant, energetic feel to it, and, in the simplest way imaginable, it does. I believe everyone in the program showed up on the first day elated to be working in such a relevantly decorated room, but, like anything overdosed, found that it failed to further stimulate after week number one. At the same time, the jerseys and scarves do provide something: A reminder of our larger goal in promoting a “soccer nation.”                                     

                                                                                     Fig. 2: Looking at the Director's Offices

    
     Adding to the sports and games theme of the room is a roulette wheel that sits in the far corner near the directors’ offices. Conveniently equipped with 16 slots, this monster summons the name of some unfortunate soul in between fiery breaths. It is used to select trainees randomly, and we all hold our collective breaths when the familiar clicking noise starts. I may never look at Wheel of Fortune or Casino Roulette the same way ever again.

     In all, The Office’s appeal will never lie in what gimmicks are placed around it, but in the action of the day. If your calls are connecting on any particular day, the colors, shapes and symbols representing MLS teams become cheerful reminders of an electrifying future. On the other hand, if today’s voices aren’t being very talkative, they appear more like phony representations of something supposedly way more exciting.

     On our first day in Blaine, the program directors asked us to remember a phrase that would serve as the program’s motto: Deadly playful, but deadly serious. Overall, The Office’s set-up fits that theme to a tee.

An Average Day at Major League Soccer’s National Sales Center (Part 1)

                The day starts with a static-laced whoosh of wind a foot from my ear, unless it’s a “shave day”, in which case it starts with a loud triplet of beeps from the same spot. My alarm clock has many different settings, and if I need to wake up earlier to shave, I just switch the alarm to the earlier setting, and the whistling wind becomes beeps. As interesting as my 7:30 AM wake up is, I’ll move past it quickly, as nothing totally wild happens here. Unless, of course, you count eye booger clear-aways and wedgie picks as wild. 

                Breakfast is served in the cafeteria on the first floor, meaning I trudge down two flights of stairs in my heavy coat and dress clothes, break a sweat, remove said coat, and proceed to wolf down some oatmeal that was made by the morning chef, either Jay or Wayne. Only the 16 Sales Center trainees use the cafeteria right now, but when teams stay at the National Sports Center to train in their respective sports, they also eat there. Wayne’s got a story for every sports team and MLS Sales Center team that’s ever eaten there. 

                I next proceed to the main administrative building of the National Sports Center where our offices are located. The only problem with this transition is that it requires a ¼ mile walk across a wide open field and an even more open parking lot, also known as a wind tunnel. It regularly whips our noses to redness. Luckily, it’s been fairly warm thus far.

                There’s something important I’m leaving out. Throughout all these steps, there’s almost always 1 or more fellow Sales Trainees alongside me (except for when I wake up.) I’d say 90% of the time it’s great to have someone to eat breakfast with or walk and talk with on the way to our building, but the other 10% of the time I would rather be alone. The beauty of having 15 others in the program is that the faces rotate each day, so on one day I may chat with the biggest guy I’ve ever seen who played on his college football team’s O-line, while on another day I’ll walk next to the petite girl from San Antonio who’s trying to get dual citizenship in the USA and Mexico. There is lots of variety, and I really like it.

                Anyways, mornings at the office are usually made up of training sessions, whether its role playing, spirit games, or something else entirely. As I said earlier, I can’t go into much detail on these. “The office” consists of 24 cubicles and two bigger cubicle offices. The bigger offices are for the program directors, while the sales trainees use 16 of the 24 cubicles. The room is arranged like this:

               

                I have a lot to say about the make-up of this room, and it’s important because I spend the majority of my days in it. Unfortunately, I’ve worn myself out on Microsoft Paint, so the room’s decorations as well as the rest of an average day will continue tomorrow or over the weekend. 

Major League Soccer has 3 teams in Canada: Toronto FC, Vancouver Whitecaps, and the expansion Montreal Impact.

Body Tics and Nervousness

Each day we do a variety of games to loosen up and practice our sales techniques. It’s been awesome entertainment watching every one of these smart, talented individuals left either speechless or stuttering at one point or another. I’ve started to notice the nervous little tics that the game’s bring out through their intentional discomfort. Some people start talking really, really fast, while others laugh extra loudly at themselves. Some turn bright red, while others start to blink and nod their heads really quickly. Some gesticulate wildly, while others shift their weight uncomfortably. Everyone has their own reaction to nervousness.

             

It only dawned on me this week that while I was getting good at noticing each person’s distinct signs of discomfort, I had yet to recognize my own. Even after trying to deduce what I do, it took me a bunch of tries before I actually caught up to myself in the heat of the moment. As it turns out, I tend to rub my hands together in front of my chest, clenching and moving them up and down my fingers and hands as if I’m trying to squeeze every last drop of liquid from my palms. I also move my lower jaw back to below my front teeth and play with my lower lip.

These little tendencies are what I’m starting to learn about myself from this experience. Pinpointing my little flaws has increased my understanding of what the other person sees when I’m under duress. Hopefully the first step to calmness under fire is seeing oneself through other people’s eyes.  

13 of the 19 teams in Major League Soccer have a soccer-specific stadium, or a stadium specifically designed and built to host MLS soccer matches.  

Reaction To First Day of Actual Sales Attempts

                It finally happened. I finally realized what the innumerable PowerPoint presentations of last week were for: To give sales trainees structure, or at least something to fall back on when their minds are racing at 6 million miles per second on the phone.  Unfortunately, the PowerPoint slides that so quaintly reminded me of every drab learning environment I’d ever been in before did not just pop into my brain one at a time to form a logical sequence of previously attained knowledge. To the contrary, they showed up as either a perfectly created mosaic or the mad doodlings of a 5-year-old, neither of which, noticeably, allow for crisp, clean stories or lucid thoughts. Needless to say, last week’s learning did not create a confident, eloquent salesperson.

                As sad, although seriously entertaining, as today was, it finally provided me with what had been missing: The simple proof that sales are viciously hard to make. For the past week I had heard horror stories and love stories, and dry stories and humorous stories, but none of those resonated with me, for the simple reason that I had never made a sales call in my life. But now that the ice has been broken, it’s obvious as to what was really being talked about that first week.

                Today, it was finally proven to me, once and for all, that I am starting at the bottom of a heavily cluttered ladder. But it also showed me something else: The NSC’s training exists precisely for this realization. Instead of a panicky evening scouring the internet for sales tips, I spent the night looking over a perfectly intelligible notebook full of information and advice that precisely addresses my concerns. Where I am going wrong is still mostly a mystery to me, but my support is in place, and I’m ready to tackle the challenge.  

Start Of Week #2

 

               Tomorrow starts the first day of selling. Tomorrow I will physically pick up the telephone, dial a number, and see if the voice on the other end wants to buy tickets to the LA Galaxy. Know anyone in LA? Hook me up. Phone selling is still something I’m coming to grips with. On one hand, I’m excited to talk with people and provide them with something they want. On the other hand, I’m not looking forward to persuading someone into buying tickets that they won’t necessarily use (not that I can, but assuming that the ultimate goal is to sell as many tickets as possible, it’s what we are all shooting for.) It seems at this point that the best thing I can do is not think about it too much and stick to the script. Call people and talk about soccer. Keep it simple.

                I’m excited to make remarks in this blog about phone calls both nasty and silly, but I will have to be vague in my descriptions. It’s been somewhat frustrating not being able to detail vividly the trainings that we’ve received here, but from now until basically retirement, anything learned in the workplace should not be riding the social media wave. It will eat me inside to only provide vague descriptions of people and actions, but I can’t see any way around it. In general, the training exists to get people out of their shell and willing to embarrass themselves and make mistakes in front of others. The world of phone talking is not a private one, so the sooner you can get over your fear of communication the better. That’s more or less the basis.

I live at the National Sports Center in Blaine, Minnesota. The National Sports Center is best described as a small college campus, with fewer buildings and many, many more soccer fields. Why someone decided to put a gazillion soccer fields in the northern outskirts of Minneapolis where the ground is frozen for 1/3 of the year is beyond me. But here I am. There’s also a hockey rink, a Velodrome (look it up), a few office buildings (one of which I work in), and probably a few more structures that I’ve never been to nor seen.

                Blaine, Minnesota is like a small city that got accidentally stepped on by a giant and was squashed like a pancake. Everything is square and 2 stories or less. If there weren’t big, corporate logos everywhere, it would somewhat resemble communist Russia, but with way more parking lots. I think 90% of Blaine, Minnesota is parking lots, or at least pavement of some sort. When driving around, it feels as if the center of town is just up ahead, although it never is. I’m not sure there even is a “center of town”.

                People in Minnesota are so darned nice. It’s like God took a survey of the nicest people in the world and moved them all to one of the coldest places possible, only because he/she/it/they knew that these friendlies would willingly embrace it. At the same time, I can’t help but think that there’s some naivety in the niceness. It’s like they would just prefer not to interact with the harsh world outside of Minnesota that is known to turn smiles into frowns. And I don’t want this to sound like a bad thing, because more than anything I’m jealous. Pick a niche and stick with it. Power on.

Went to the Mall of America this past weekend and rode an indoor roller coaster that wasn’t at all dinky. This mall really was the mall of America: It represented, to a tee, the land of the free and the home of the brave. Walking around was completely free (although anything else was not) and finding parking was only for the brave (although it was free.) We walked around, and walked around some more. Then I got a free ride on a roller coaster. It IS the little things in life...

The team with the highest attendance in Major League Soccer is the Seattle Sounders, who averaged 38,496 fans per game in 2011.