The Good, The Bad, The Beautiful and The Ugly of Sales

                When did I arrive here? January 2^nd. Just like anything new, I showed up in Minnesota without the slightest clue as to how the coming days would play out. I pretended to. I read each of the 6 or so recommended books, but it felt like trying to memorize a string of numbers. Without any examples to compare the topics to in my life and work, the words on each page felt like they were written in another language. Not until I staggered out of my first sales call did any trainings or readings kick in, and even then it was as if I had digested only the first paragraph of the first book. Like any skill or occupation, sales has a learning curve that I’m just getting started on. Now seven weeks into it, the steepness of my curve has begun to lessen. I’m beginning to learn what I like about sales and what I could live without.

                Making a sale feels like a mix of riding the Superman roller coaster straight downwards, getting a perfect 100 on a difficult test, and watching Landon Donovan score the winning goal in the 2010 World Cup to advance the USA. Oh, and also being high on every drug ever created. I spend 99% of my work time not making a sale, so when the euphoric moment does finally arrive, I do everything I can to embrace it. I crunch the pen in between my thumb and forefinger and listen intently as the credit card numbers slip through the lips of my new customer. When the final touches have been made, I straighten up in my chair and pour over that glorious piece of paper to ensure that I haven’t made a potentially fatal mistake. All the hard work and worry has culminated in just a name, an address, and a few numbers, but how utterly fantastic they are!

                There is a specific point in some sales calls in which both parties loosen up. It’s another part of sales that I really love. Each call starts with the typical formalities, in which I introduce myself and, most of the time, they hang up. Every once in a while, however, they listen to what I have to say. Once they realize that I’m a human being with thoughts and feelings, and I in turn loosen up, sales becomes extremely fun. These moments are great energy drivers for the day. It’s the little things, ya know?

                There are other aspects of sales that I really appreciate. Working on a sales team is an awesome way to progress through work hours, as each day brings about a new set of hilarious phrases and funny stories that liven up the place. Also, although customers can be fickle, when I get one that is happy to talk and interested in the product, it’s extremely rewarding. In the same way, having someone kindly tell me “no” instead of leading me on for two weeks is similarly enjoyable. Maybe the most important thing to know about sales is how immensely challenging it is, both mentally and tactically. Even though it wears on everyone at different points, the challenge of it all is probably what brings people like me back to my cubicle every day. I dig that. 

                The flip side of sales is the dreaded drought. It’s at these times that I really start to question what the hell I’m doing. It’s as if someone has attached a device to my vocal chords that emits a frequency that scares anyone who hears me away. Confidence falters. Is it me? Why is everyone around me making sale after sale? What am I doing wrong? Unlike other occupations, there is never an obvious answer to what’s going wrong, no error to pinpoint and correct. It can also turn into a vicious cycle if I start to strain too hard and put too much pressure on myself and the customer. 

As touched on earlier, a big part of being on a sales team is seeing other people be successful all around me. Hearing a teammate tell me a story of how they just nailed down a huge sale can damage my confidence, ego, mood and outlook. I don’t believe that the “last sale story” is ever told maliciously, but it does sometimes leave me wondering why I haven’t done made that HUGE sale. This is just one example of the serious incentive issues on sales teams. On one hand, everyone on the team is working towards filling up the stands of a sports team, but on the other hand, everyone is competing with everyone else to put the most people in those seats. My teammates are also my competition. It’s totally weird. 

                Every 20 calls or so, I get someone who doesn’t appreciate my call, and are not afraid to let me know about it. Perhaps skin can grow thicker, but, for me at least, I don’t know if it will ever grow thick enough to shield me from not feeling something when the disembodied voice gets angry. And as many times as I try to tell myself that I’m not here to piss anyone off, in a way I am. I’m here to do my job and, every so often, that means infuriating someone else. Sometimes even worse than being yelled at and hung up on is being completely hung out to dry. Often the disembodied voice will respond as minimally as possible to my questions, leaving me feeling like less of a human and more of a robot. It’s like they haven’t spoken a word in 50 years and are still getting used to the concept. When this happens, I have to pry little words like “a” and “the” and “yea” out of their mouths like I’m trying to open up a clamshell. So, to summarize, never being able to predict or trust the person on the other line is really discomforting. It creates a “you vs. the world” mentality. This contrarian ideology is not easy to embrace, and when I leave my desk to reengage as a normal member of society I tend to realize how much easier acting naturally is and pine for more time as myself.

                Sales comes with a lot of pressure. When I’m not selling, I have a tendency to freak out and question my own worth in the job. This is true with almost any position, but I’ve felt like it’s magnified in sales. Because sales is so tremendously stats driven, life becomes a fight to drive up your revenue as high as possible. We all put a ton of pressure on ourselves to keep this little number in our heads continuously ticking upwards. At the same time, we all know that everyone else on the team is doing the same thing. The competition is extremely direct. The pressure drives long hours, which can become a drag at times, and the only way to overcome it is to work more hours. Not an ideal concept for pursuing other projects.

                When is my time in Blaine, MN up? Option #1 is I “graduate” in 1 week and get hired by an MLS team the following week. Option #2 is I stay on until the end of March, and get hired by an MLS team in early April. Option #3 is that I stay on until the end of April, at which point I go home or get hired. There’s a lot riding on each alternative, a perfect example of sales’ cutthroat culture. Here’s how I look at it: If I succeed, I’ll be able to enjoy the aspects of sales that I love, and, if I fail, I won’t have to deal with the parts of sales that I’m not fond of. Who says the glass is half empty? 

Major League Soccer's 17th season kicks off two weeks from today...

Sales “Skill”

The National Sales Center has moved on to Phase 2, aptly named NSC II. The difference between this session and the last, aside from the fact that four trainees have left, is that we do less actual training and more calling. For this entire month, we will be back selling for the Los Angeles Galaxy, last year’s MLS Cup champions. We are already two weeks in, so in another two weeks, some number of people will again graduate from the program.

16 trainees started at Major League Soccer’s National Sales Center on January 2^nd. We are now down to 12. After having been deemed ready for full-time employment by the program’s directors, four initial program members were hired by three different MLS teams last week. The decision to graduate them was based on a few objective criteria, namely how much they sold and how well they scored on the learned techniques, as well as a few smaller factors. This is how we are graded, so this is what we shoot to score high in. Yet I still find myself asking the same question: What is sales skill?

                Everything at the National Sales Center is a contest. Our first item of business when we arrived in Blaine, MN was to pick our cubicles. To determine the pecking order, we played a memory game where any ties were settled via a rock, paper, scissor tournament. Throughout the session, contests have varied from Jeopardy style trivia games to sales revenue challenges, and the prizes have varied from extra cash to MLS gear to pride.  The games incentivize us, keep the job fun and keep us motivated through sales’ low points. The biggest game of all is the big board of stats that the directors keep track of and that we as trainees are always attuned to.  It charts our sales revenue and our “selling technique” grade. These marks form the foundation for choosing who leaves and stays throughout the course of the program, so high scores on the big board are the best indicators of who is next to graduate. In this program, they measure how good of a salesperson you are.

                In sports, it is easy to pick out the best players. They are the ones that run the fastest, jump the highest, throw the hardest, make highlight reel plays, etc. At the National Sales Center, we try to translate these skills into sales, and it sort of works. The idea of comparing people’s stats is nice and tidy, but does it fully indicate sales success? Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t, but we need something to judge us on, and since there are very few concrete numbers in sales, they more or less have to be used. But it does create a few problems. For instance, any salesperson can call a lead that was already set on buying 2 luxury boxes, jot down a credit card number, and have way more revenue than anyone else for the whole program, and that would just be luck. In terms of selling technique grades, we could all be drones with monotone voices and potentially produce a very good score in technique, but would we be experimenting with clients, figuring out on our own what works best and what doesn’t? As much as we try to dissect what makes good and bad salespeople here, it seems like no amount of factors would ever be able to pinpoint very accurately the best from the rest. So we make do with what we can.

                Getting away from the National Sales Center for a second, it’s just a fact of business that certain salespeople are better than others. Over the course of time, statistics generally don’t lie. A salesperson that brings in more revenue over the course of five years is almost certainly better than one who brings in less. So what separates them? Even having been in the sales world for only 6 weeks, I’ve got a pretty good idea of what that is: The winner has a greater passion for sales and competition. Simply put, the most important part of sales is working the most hours in the sales process. You have to love, more than anything else, the brief high you feel after making a sale, have absolute fear of letting someone else beat you, and also have extremely thick skin to ignore those who don’t appreciate your persistence and intrusiveness, and aren’t afraid to say it. If you think this sounds easy, sales is right for you.

                Effort and long hours on the phones aside, I continue to vacillate between believing that sales is a skill-less occupation and believing that some people really know what they’re doing while others really do not. When athletes compete, it is easy to see who was better and why. Maybe the red team had a quarterback who hit every receiver he played with right in the numbers, or maybe the blue team had a pitcher who dominated every hitter he faced. In sales, there is nothing as tangible as that. There isn’t even necessarily a way to tell whether you are doing poorly or doing well because there are times in which nobody is interested in buying, plain and simple. Without being able to measure much of what a salesperson does, we can’t ever be sure of what we are doing “right” and what we are doing “wrong”, leaving a terribly vague notion of what it takes to get better. But like I said before, success seems to be directly linked to high numbers and effort. The salespeople that put the most hours into the sales process and meet the most people have the best chance of meeting someone interested in their product. That’s sales skill.

Sales attracts highly competitive people, which leads me to another topic I hope to tackle next: The Negative Perception of Sales. Before then, I’ll try to fill you in on more details of the sales action in Blaine, MN. 

The MLS season kicks off in 3 weeks...

The Phone Dance

                Sales calls remind me of a dance. There’s a rhythm to every exchange that varies from call to call. Sometimes we waltz, sometimes we salsa, sometimes we foxtrot. Sometimes I end up dancing the arms-crossed, legs-flailing Russian jig all by myself (see Figure 1) (I can also whip up a solid Electric Slide when I need to.) Whichever dance it becomes, my goal is always to get the disembodied voice on the other end whirling around the dance floor (but not grinding.) I need to have every conceivable dance move available in my arsenal, ready to be busted out when the situation calls.

Figure 1

               
                Here’s how a typical phone call at the National Sales Center starts:

               

                Brenda: “Hello?”

                Me: (sweetly) “Hi, is this Brenda?”

                Brenda: (suspiciously) “Yes.”

                Me: (oozing with enthusiasm) “Hi Brenda, my name’s Dan, I’m calling from *Team*! How are ya today!?”

                Brenda: (somewhat disappointedly) “Oh. Good.”

                Me: (reassuringly) “That’s great Brenda! The reason for my call today is…”

The above exchange is trivial, but enthusiasm expressed early in any call is truly important. They say people decide whether to buy or not in the first 30 seconds. I don’t know who “they” are or whether “they” are right, but it’s better to be safe than sorry. This is the part of the dance process in which I gently escort my partner out to the middle of the floor and gracefully lead them in the dance of their choice. Unfortunately, right now, I’m dragging them out to the dance floor by their feet and flailing my arms and legs around wildly. I’ll get there.

Once we have established that we’d like to dance, the tension leaves, and we settle into a basic two-step. Our voices rise and fall to match each other’s intonations and speeds. Questions fly around like swarms of gnats, while answers eliminate them like hungry bats. As we pick up speed, the conversation starts to crescendo. The barriers to human emotional connection are breaking. The speed and daring of the dance continues to pick up until you hit the turn.

The turn occurs right when someone breaks the basic question and answer chain. Here’s when the conversation “turns” to the business at hand. It is usually initiated with a somewhat hesitant “let me tell you about…” from myself, but on occasion my dance partner takes the lead. We both know that the song we are dancing to is nearing completion, and we have to figure out how it to end it. 

                Sometimes we finish the dance with gusto, and the voice buys. Sometimes we get tangled up clumsily, and the voice doesn’t buy. Either way, we thank each other for the entire opportunity and part ways. We stay on each other’s minds for only a few moments more before we start looking for other opportunities to feel the rhythm in our feet. May I have this dance?

Some Major League Soccer teams have eliminated their nicknames and switched over to a more European style club name. For instance, the Dallas Burn switched their club name to FC Dallas in 2005. The 5 teams without nicknames in Major League Soccer are FC Dallas, Toronto FC, Chivas USA, Sporting Kansas City and Real Salt Lake.

Tunnel Vision

This week we sold for FC Dallas. On Friday evening, 3-5 people will be told that they have graduated the training and will soon be interviewed by MLS teams. I, in all likelihood, will not be one of them this time around.

                It’s easy to sit at a cubicle surrounded by fragmented phone conversations and forget about everything outside the office. The broken conversations around me make it impossible to ignore the dance with the disembodied voice that I will soon initiate. In this environment, only two topics exist, soccer and sales, and everything else gets lost somewhere in the fray. 

                After almost 5 full weeks, I find myself occasionally pinching my arm to remember how young and relatively insignificant Major League Soccer is. By immersing myself in the league for 24 hours a day and 7 days a week, I have mentally transformed it from a gentle sideshow into a monster of the professional sports world. All of these players, most of whom the world has never heard of before, have become larger-than-life celebrities to me. For instance, do you know of FC Dallas’ Brek Shea? He is, no doubt, a very good soccer player, but, in the end, only soccer fans or Dallas area natives with a sports interest have ever heard of him. In my mind, players like him have risen to the very top of the social pyramid. I am convinced that they will soon run for president. I’m so focused on MLS and star players that I often lose perspective on who is what and what is who on a larger scale.

                It’s the same thing with sales. Call, contemplate, share with someone else who is barely listening, settle down, and call again. That’s the arrangement, that’s the rhythm. In the office, each call of substance means so much to me. Yet an outsider who glanced into the room would probably give the most practical and polite advice of all: Try not dwelling on it and just making another call. What grand perspective. Each phone conversation is between 2 people and lasts between 5 and 10 minutes, and is pretty soon forgotten by both parties. But by being involved in it each and every day, I tend to forget this, and, more to the point, I forget how small and insignificant our little operation in Blaine, Minnesota really is.

                Have you ever been so obsessed with something that you forget to live sensibly? That has started to be the case for me here. It shouldn’t matter to me that someone on the other end of the line didn’t want tickets to an FC Dallas game right then, yet I often hang up the phone in a rage, cursing under my breath at how stupid that particular person was. Basically, I’m saying that the person on the other end of the line is completely irrational for not being interested enough in me and my team to give me their credit card number and charge it a lot of money a month and a half before the season even begins. Hmmm… Who’s being irrational here?