Telephone sales

I am always amazed, though never discouraged, by people’s wish for a telephone sales training that would let them sell over the phone. As a rule, the audience offered to me is a group of browbeaten young people from a call centre who have no initiative whatsoever and who, at most, need a script rather than a thoughtful training with theory and enough practice for them to be able to improvise. I never tire of explaining that the most you can sell over the phone is the next stage of the sale. And when people object that they do sell over the phone, so more must be possible, it turns out that we are not talking about selling at all, but about supplying an already acquired client with new batches of goods. For example, when a wholesaler uses the phone and a few girls to push its goods out to distributors with whom the deal (the agreement to cooperate) was closed long ago by a real salesperson.

At the same time, a couple of days ago, I witnessed a real example of working (?) phone sales. No, really. A person organized sales over the phone. On the side of the road, there was a bag of potatoes with a piece of paper attached to it that had the owner’s mobile phone number on it.