Sales Exponential

When I decided to become a salesman which was in 1960 I had the good fortune to join a newspaper group that was just about to develop an operation to sell Classified Advertising. It may surprise you to learn that Classified Advertisements had not been actively sold previously by any newspapers in the UK.

I was 30 years of age at the time and as a rookie salesman I joined a new team of recruits formed to sell Classified adverts to the local business community. At the same time a new telesales department was set up with 12 new female telesales operators. This operation was duplicated throughout every newspaper office within The Thompson newspaper group. Because this was a new operation, no local experience existed in our city or indeed within the whole of the UK. Trainers were brought in from America and were set up in offices in Fleet St London where those recruited as Sales Managers for each Newspaper were put through a crash training course in selling classified ads on the streets and via the telephone.

These new managers then returned to their local newspapers to train the new personnel, the male recruits were to sell in the field and the females were to sell over the telephone.

I first joined the field sales team and within a year had become the best salesman on the team and was then given the opportunity to move into the telesales department, first as a telesales operator and when I had proved I could make the sales I was then made the trainer for the department. After a while I was appointed Field sales manager and later was given the position of Classified Sales Manager for a group of local newspapers where I had to create the whole operation from scratch.

This was invaluable experience for me which later on in a new sales career Telephone Selling became the cornerstone of my future success.

I had reached the top of the promotion ladder in the newspaper group and I was only 42 and the prospect of marking time in that position until i was 60 did not appeal to me so I took the risk of becoming a self employed Insurance salesman. The first day in my new career I discovered that field work – cold calling ion businesses to sell insurance was not going to be a rewarding proposition because of the difficulty of getting in to see the proprietors.

On my second day I picked up the telephone and made 5 calls to a selected group of local companies.

At each call I made a short introduction and asked for an appointment with the Managing Director.

From those 5 calls I made 3 appointments. This conversion ratio convinced me that I would succeed in this business so I immediately recruited and trained a part time telesales girl who then proceeded to make all the future appointments I could cope with. The hardest job in selling insurance is finding suitable prospects to talk to. I had created a mechanism that provided me with an endless supply of the right type of people to whom I could sell my service. The result of this was that by the end of my first year in my new business I earned 20 times ( Twenty) more than I had earned the previous year as an executive in one of the largest companies in the country.

I then went on to replicate a telesales operation in 10 branches across the UK to provide appointments for salespeople I had recruited and trained to sell the same service.

Telesales was a new phenomenon at that time but has since proved to be a catalyst in the growth in sales of thousands of businesses throughout the country.