There is no crying in sales!

I have been in sales since 1999, what I consider most of my adult working life!  I know sales, I get sales and I understand sales!  I have learned from some of the best.  NEVER in my life did I ever think that sales would make me cry.  I consider myself to be a fairly strong person and I hold a lot of stuff in but never did I expect this.  I had been out of work for a few months and although I was enjoying my time home and playing house, I felt that I needed to contribute to the household financially and it was time to go back to work.  I had done the IE to OC commute for 7+ years and frankly, my car and I were over that drive and I just didn’t want to do it anymore.  I realize all the well paying jobs are in OC, but I was willing to cut corners and make sacrifices to be able to work close to home. 

 I had been applying at this company in Wildomar for about a year now and could not figure out why they were not calling me in for an interview.  I had all the qualification they were looking for and more.  I knew nothing about this company, all I knew is that they were close to my house and I needed to work there.  I continued to apply and finally, one day I received an email that they were holding “open interviews.”  They gave me a window of when they were holding interviews and I chose the first available.  I was there bright eyed and bushy tailed the next morning at 10 am.  I walked in with head held high and freshly printed copies of my resume.  What I didn’t expect was a room full of folding chairs and dozens of people filling out applications.  In most cases, I would have turned around and walked out, but remember, I really wanted this job.  I filled out my application and waiting patiently.  I was called in for my interview where I met with Crystal (the owner) and Mike (Director of Sales).  At the time in which I was interviewing I was super sick and had been for months.  I caught a nasty cold and could not get rid of it, but I put on my big girl panties and went in with a smile.  I NAILED that interview.  That was one of my best.  I felt comfortable with them and we all meshed really well.  In the beginning o]f the interview they had said to hang onto the extra copy of my resume because if things went well they might have me meet with Richard.  Well, when Crystal and Mike were done with me, they said they would be in touch and I was on my way home.  I wasn’t sure why I wasn’t asked to meet with Richard, but that was ok.  That same day I received an email from Mike and he was informing me that he wanted me to meet with Richard and so we set a time.  I showed up, early of course and waited patiently.  That day at the office seemed a bit hectic as employees were running around and it seemed all out of sorts.  That was ok, I like chaos and working in crazy busy offices.  I sat and watched people go in and out of the office where I was supposed to be meeting.  I watched this man who I presumed to be Richard get in a car and drive away.  I was perplexed as I sat there.  Why would anyone leave the office knowing that you have a 10 am appointment and it is now going on 11 am!?!?!?

Finally, they call me in and we get started.  I am now meeting with Crystal (the owner), Mike (Director of Sales) and Richard (the owner’s husband).  Richard plops down right next to me and start firing out the questions.  That day was one of the worst days as far as my cold was concerned.  I had never felt worse and I was sweating like a $2 whore.  He kept firing questions at me and I grew more and more uncomfortable.  He kept repeating himself and I was getting frustrated.  I hate when people repeat themselves.  I think he sensed my frustration and he continued repeating himself.  He had asked me why they should hire me, which to me is the lamest interview question ever and tells me that you have nothing better to ask me and so you are just using that one.  I told him that he was not going to find anyone better than me.  I am loyal, dependable, hardworking and I am a woman!  You see, woman in most cases have a better chance in being successful in sales.  He said that was all fine but he needed more meat and potatoes and what I needed was some cold medicine and my bed.  It got to the point where I just laughed, there was nothing more that I could tell him so I just laughed.  We stand, shake hands and he tells me that was a great interview.  I felt it was so/so but if thought it went well then that’s all that mattered.  

I get home and get side tracked with life and I had forgotten to send my follow up thank you email.  Only a day or so had passed so I went ahead and sent it.  A few days go by and I have heard nothing.  I email again, maybe my first email was overlooked because of the chaos over there.  FINALLY, I get a response.  He, Richard, proceeds to tell me, via email, that he was unimpressed with my interview and feels that I interviewed poorly and asked why.  I was dumb-founded, why would someone tell me “great interview” only to them bash me in an email.  I took the professional approach and explained that I don’t normally make excuses, however I was very ill that day and was not feeling 100% and it was not normal for me not to do well at something.

In the same email, of him bashing me, is an offer letter.  Talk about an emotional roller coaster!!!

I read over the offer, the base was lower that I was used to but again it was super close to home.  I signed and returned the offer letter.  Two days later I started work.  I was excited and nervous.  My first day of work was consumed with filling out new hire paperwork and meeting my co-workers.  Everyone seemed very nice and welcoming, my favorite part was the casual dress.  This was going to be the best job ever!  The first week and half was about learning, taking notes and listening to calls.  There was no real training program at this company but since I have been through this before it was not a big deal, I knew what questions to ask and what to pay attention to.  The training part consumed the morning hours and then I was sat at my desk and told to mine the internet for leads.  This is where I became a little concerned.  Here I am just starting a job in an industry that I am unfamiliar with where the bulk of the compensation plan is in the commission and they don’t have any leads ready for me to call on.  I spent hours online searching, printing and data entry of companies that I felt would have a need for low voltage wires and cables.  Next I was tasked with writing my own phone script.  Um what?  I am the new employee and am told to find my own leads and now you want me to create my own phone script?  I did as I was told and I wrote a script and sent to Mike (Director of Sales) to be looked over.  He and I went back and forth with the script until we both felt that is was good enough for me to use when I was ready to start making calls.  I continued to listen to calls, take tours of the warehouse and receive general training on category cables.  After about 2 weeks, I was bored and really just wanted to get on the phone and start qualifying the leads that I had entered into Salesforce.com and turning them into opportunities.  That was of course how I was going to make all my money.  

I finally went live on the phone and figured I would just learn as I go, that is the best way for me to learn, trial and error.  I would come in at 8 am and figure out where I was going to start and then I would start making the calls.  Mike sat only a few desks away so I knew he was there as I would have questions and figured he would chime in as I was making calls and offering me advice on my calls and where I could improve.  I spent a few days on the phone without him saying a word and so I kept on plugging away.  I was keeping track of the number of calls I was making because this helped me know how many I was making each and if I needed to make more.  Mike started to come over to my desk to sit and listen to a call here and there and would give me little tid bits, but was not very hands on with me and I felt that he was not doing a very good job of training me.

It is brought to my attention that I need to increase my number of outbound calls because it seems that when Richard would check the sales cam, it seemed that I was not on the phone, yet I was typing on the computer and he could not understand why.  I explained to Mike that I would make a call and then enter a note so that the next time I would call that company I would know what transpired the last time I tried calling them.  Mike felt this process was slowing me down and advised me to print out lists of companies, call from the lists, make notes next to the company on the list and then at the end of the day I can sit and enter them into Salesforce.com.  This makes no sense to me because it seems to be not only a waste of paper but a waste of my time and I felt I would be more productive if I had all my leads in Salesforce.com and using that to make my calls.  I tried to avoid the list option as long as I could but they started to become increasingly frustrated with me.  Fine, I will print out some damn lists.

I start making calls the minute I walk in the door at 8 am and continue to do so until about 2 or 3 pm and then I would sit and do my data entry. 

About 3 weeks have passed and I have an email from Richard, he has copied Crystal, Mike and the gal in Accounting who also doubles as Human Resources.  In his email he is “sharing” with me what he has seen as successful at all the companies that he has managed and owned.  He then explains why there are cameras all over the building and mainly why they are in the sales room, which is where my desk is.  In all his wisdom he says to be successful in sales it is all about making calls.  You make a call, enter a note, make a call enter a note etc.  And with what he has seen on the camera, I was not doing this. 

I couldn’t believe I was actually reading this!  First off, no shit that calls = equal sales, you dumbass, that is sales 101 and it certainly doesn’t take an experienced sales person to figure that out.  Second, I was keeping track of how many calls I was making each day and I was averaging 75-80 calls a day.  That is a lot of calls, but keeping mind that I was getting disconnected numbers and no answers as well.  I was impressed with my call numbers because when they hired me they said 50-60 calls a day for the first 90 days and then once my pipeline was getting warmer the number of calls needed would decrease because I would be focusing on entering orders.  The last bit that I found interesting was the enter a call, make a note…..  That’s what I was doing and then I was told not to and now I am being told to.   Clearly no one is on the same page around here.

The rude emails that I was receiving clearly were not doing the job so Richard started calling meetings.  It would be me, Mike, Crystal and Richard.  Basically they three of them would sit there and tell me everything that I was doing wrong.  Nothing was ever constructive, it was all just very negative. My 75-80 calls a day was not enough,  I was not asking enough questions throughout the day, I was not picking the brains of the successful sales people around me (including Crystal and Richard), I was not doing anything right.  It was right about this time that this job had brought me to tears.  I would do outside for breaks, call my husband and just cry.  I was frustrated because I was doing everything I could to build my own pipeline and yet in their eyes it was all wrong.  It was decided that we would have meetings every Tuesday and Thursday to sit down and discuss my progress and it left up to me to schedule the meetings.  Ok, easy enough.  I scheduled them in Outlook and put them on all our calendars.  Not one of the others accepted the meeting request and I think that is because no one knows how to use Outlook other than to send emails.  The way meetings happened around there, was 15 minutes before the start of the meeting you were told we are having a meeting and then everyone would scramble around getting their shit together  and ready for the meeting.  My status meetings however, I was told at the exact time that we were having a meeting and so I would go in so not mentally prepared for any of what they were about to hand to me. 

I did however, have time to plan for one meeting and I was damn proud of myself. Danny kept telling me to stand up to this asshole and don’t let him get me so upset.  I created a spreadsheet that contacted the number of calls I made each day up until that day, the total of all those days and an average.  I then had the quotes that I had created, including the company name, the date of the quote and the dollar amount.  The last part of my spreadsheet was quotes that I took from emails that Richard had sent me.  One quote was how he continued to say, as long as I was making 50-60 calls a day and if I had not made a sale within my first 90 days that was ok because he could see I was making the calls and tracking all that in Salesforce.com.  Another quote was him contradicting himself when he was telling me that I need to call from a list and then do the data entry at the end of the day but in one of his emails he said “make a call then make a note….”  He saw that and was a little shocked that I was calling him out.  Before I even got to that part to explain what it was any why it was there, he commented on my quoting him so he knew what it was.  He then proceeded to sit there and bold face LIE and say he would NEVER have said “make a call, make a note,” even though I have it in email and had shared that email with a close friend of mine.  He just sat there saying, no way, no way, no way.  My heart just started pounding out of my chest because at this point I wanted to pound him in the face and tell him to wake the fuck up!  Are you serious right now?  He looked at Mike and said “I would never have said that” and Mike then for once backed me up and explained to him that he did say it in an email and Richard was dead set against admitting that he made a mistake, that he did say it and that he had contradicted himself.  Oh my gosh, ok, whatever!  I can tell he is heated at this point and he goes back to my spreadsheet looks at the quote information I have included and asks me what product I had quoted on each of the 5 or 6 quotes.  Hmmm, well one had some Cat5E, one had some Cat6, another had some coax cable and some other accessory thingys  and ………………  He and Crystal stop me at this point and tell me that I need to know every little item that is on every quote that I ever send out.  By my not knowing item for item of what is on these quotes, tells them that I have learned nothing.  WHAT????  I have barely finished my first month or so of employment in an entirely new industry and you are beating me down because I cannot remember item for item what I have on outstanding quotes.  Go to hell you pieces of shit.

I continue to pound the phones, I am making some good calls and contacting some companies that will make great customers, when they are ready to make a purchase.  You have to remember that I am calling companies that have been buying all their cabling supplies from the same vendor for 10, 15, 30 even 30 years and here I am, calling from Primus Cable and all of a sudden I want you to buy from me!  That is NOT going to happen over night.

I would go into work with the challenge of avoiding Richard.  It was hard to do because his office was right across from the bathroom.  I would only use the restroom a few times a day except for the days when I knew he was not around then I would use the bathroom freely.  I also used the bathroom when I need to check my phone and to reply to text messages.  I personally feel that Richard was upset that I did not worship the ground that he walked on like everyone else did. 

The calls continued and I began to build a few relationships.  A few emails, a few faxes and finally I had two companies that were interested in trying a box of cable and so I had two sales in one day that equaled a total of three boxes of cable.  I was ok with that and I was happy that I was able to get some cable out the door for them to try and knew that it would eventually lead to bigger and more frequent orders.  I had a couple other quality prospects and one that was so close to ordering that they had filled out the new customer agreement.  They finally decided to order and she sent me a check via UPS Red.  The check got lost and they needed the cable ASAP and had to order from another vendor that was willing to pay the freight to send it to them overnight.  She had promised that the next time they needed cable she would email me because she wanted to build that relationship with us and wanted us to become a vendor for them.  Every time they needed something she would email me, but they were so slow in the process that we were always missing their deadline and I was never able to get a shipment out to them.

There was another company that I had been emailing about some outdoor cable and made a recommendation on what they should use and well he ordered online and not through me so I didn’t get the credit for it.  DAMN IT.

Call after call after call after call and I kept hearing the same thing, “Thank you for the call, we will add you to our vendor list and when a need comes up we will let you know.”  Awesome, I felt I was building a solid pipeline that would just suddenly explode and the orders would come in.  Richard would pop by my desk, calling me Katie and changing his original statement of not worrying about making a sale in the first 90 days and now it was time to make a call to action.  Yes asshole, I know.  I knew I had to sell and that was my goal, no one could survive on the base alone that I was bring paid.  I could tell his attitude toward me was getting worse and Mike was being more of an ass than usual.

We would have frequent company meetings so that Richard could remind everyone just how wealthy he was and inform the rest of us that we are losers.  He brought me up again and let everyone know that it was mission critical that I sell something and if that didn’t happen soon, he was going to show me where the unemployment office was.  That was the last straw for me, it was time to start looking for another job.  This guy and this company were crazy and I wanted no part of it.

I continued to come in and make my calls but I just didn’t care anymore and they stopped caring as well, if they ever did.  Friday morning I was called into the accounting office where I was handed my last check and told me that I was not producing sales as fast as they had wanted me to and since it was an at will company, they were letting me go.  That is the end of that.  I came home and filed for unemployment yet again!