9 Misconceptions VS Reality of Holding a Sales Job

9 Misconceptions VS Reality of Holding a Sales Job

Some background, the context of this article is from the perspective of someone who has worked in a bank selling financial products to mass market customers. When I was a wide-eyed fresh graduate, I had a very innocent view of the working world. I joined the bank as a management trainee and in the end, I made a choice to join the sales department because I considered myself a ‘people person’ and I had lofty goals of ‘increasing financial literacy among the masses’.

I really didn’t like being there. After seven months, through sheer luck and a lot of help, I transferred out to a different department.

The purpose of this article is not to demean sales positions, but to shed light on the reality of the nature of the work so people can better judge for themselves if they can handle the pressures and challenges of this job. If you want to know all the good things about a sales job, there are plenty of people out there who can sugarcoat it for you.

Right here are the nine misconceptions people might have about holding a sales position, unsugarcoated.

 

1. MINIMAL DESK JOB

Obviously my desk wasn’t this pretty or well-lit. And I swear some of the computers still had CRT monitors.

Reality

As a salesperson, I spent 70% of my time behind a desk, if not more. There are multiple reasons for this.

a) You have to do a lot of cold-calling, about 200 or more a day. Customers don’t always pick up and you have to call them at least three times at different times of the day. If they have five different numbers? Yeah, you get to call them 15 times. Some of them pick up but are too busy. Some of them listen to you and want to consider it first. Some of them yell expletives at you and threaten to do unspeakable things to you if you call them again. You mark that particular customer as ‘not interested’, but the system somehow recycles his name every few months and the universe has a sick enough sense of humour to have his name appear in your list of leads again.

And then, after calling a customer, you have to type in a report of your interaction with them. Did they pick up? Which number did you call? Did they seem interested? What was the reason for rejection? Did you explain the products adequately? Did they have any complaints? How did you resolve it?

b) Finding customers willing to meet in person (so you have an excuse to leave your desk) is an art. You either get them through referrals or when some of your cold calls work.

Again, after meeting them, you have to write a detailed report about your encounter. Perhaps you might think, “Why should I bother writing so much about each interaction I have with the customers?” You’ll find out in the next point.

 

2. YOUR CUSTOMERS BELONG TO YOU

“I dare you to blink.”

Reality
Probably the biggest joke ever. Like money, customers can be stolen. If you don’t properly document your encounter with your important customers (someone at the verge of buying a product you’re trying to sell), any of your ruthless peers can waltz right in, call the customer (their number is in the system after all) and close the sale, taking your commission.

Obviously you can contest this and try to win your customer (and money) back, but guess what? More paperwork, more wading through bureaucracy and more deskwork.

 

3. YOU WILL BUILD GENUINE RELATIONSHIPS WITH CUSTOMERS AND ONLY SELL PRODUCTS YOU BELIEVE IN

Not to this extent lah, but stock photos are limited.

Reality
When I joined sales, I aspired to be the kind of person who knew a product inside out so I could tell the customer which product would prove to be the best fit for their needs. I wanted to build a genuine relationship of mutual trust and respect with customers. If a product isn’t good for them, then I wouldn’t recommend it.

But I conveniently forgot that each product had its own sales target and I had to sell a certain number of all of them to hit my KPI.

The problem started when I found certain products to be unbeneficial, to put it mildly. I’m the type of person who will never recommend a product to someone unless I would be willing to buy it myself. You can guess how often I had a ‘conversation’ with my supervisor every time he enquired about how I was not selling certain products. We did the whole tango literally every week. I questioned the ethics of selling something which I personally believe to be unbeneficial to customers. I think he understood my frustration, but he still had to do his job of monitoring my performance. When I think about it now, I feel sorry for him.

 

4. YOU HAVE ACCESS TO PRODUCT INFORMATION

“Trust me, I have a chart.”

Reality
New products get rolled out from time to time, and ‘product experts’ from HQ would come around to brief the sales force on how to sell the products. Crudely speaking, we were trained to memorise a certain script and parrot them to customers.

Any deeper questions about the product would not be met with a satisfactory answer. Example, if there’s an investment-linked insurance product I was supposed to sell…

a) I would ask what the underlying product for the investment is? Or is it just another portfolio manager managing another fund?
b) I would ask how long has this particular fund been around (not the company, but this particular portfolio)? If they started the fund three months ago, then it hardly has any track record. How can I say this is a good investment? Who are the managers? Do they have a track record over other funds I could look at?
c) If they said the profit is 20%, I would ask them is that per annum? Or over five years? Or ten years? Is this 20% a CAGR or cumulative number?
d) What kind of company or industry or region does this portfolio invest in? In what proportions?
e) Can customers choose to switch? Will they be slapped a fee? When can they do it?
f) Is their principle guaranteed? What if the investment goes bad and the company folds? Is there some sort of body that guarantees the principal amount, never mind the loss of potential income? Up to how much? If they only guarantee up to RM10,000 per person, then I believe it is something worth mentioning to customers, should they choose to invest more.

As you could probably guess, trainers would get tired of me very quickly. The above questions were all highly factual. I didn’t even get to some of my more difficult questions. Forget competitor analysis.

Some of them genuinely didn’t know, because they weren’t taught that much. When I ask for some sort of information so I could do my own reading in my own time, I expected a thick booklet full of small words. But the most I would get was several pieces of A4 paper containing very vibrant, attractive looking pie charts printed from PowerPoint. All I got was some dumbed-down information.

I didn’t stop there, I tried looking for the product owner, as in the people who created this product, but I couldn’t find them.

Once in a while, people would chide me and say, “Retail customers don’t ask the questions that you ask. Just tell them they can make a profit, and convince them to buy.”

But that’s not the point, is it? How can I sell something I don’t understand? What if a customer invests the entire education fund for his child hoping for a 20% profit every year, but after ten years, he finds out that the value of his principal has been eroded by 20% instead?

I don’t think my questions were unreasonable or particularly difficult to answer. But with hindsight, I understand now that the sales force is like an army. When you are told to sell something, you sell and you bring in revenue. Your position is not to analyse and question.

 

5. YOU HAVE ACCESS TO SUPPORT WHEN YOU HAVE TROUBLE WITH A PRODUCT

“Hahaha good luck bro.”

Reality
The support call centre were manned by equally clueless people. They were taught a certain script, and they parrot it back to you. I wouldn’t mind so much if not for the fact that I got ten different answers if I called ten different times, to make sure. Information was not consistent, so if a customer had a problem, I literally couldn’t help them resolve it.

Do you know how the turnover rate in the sales force is high? The same holds true for support call centres. You get new people all the time and mistakes happen all the time.

 

6. CUSTOMERS ARE RATIONAL

“Okay maybe going all WWE wasn’t such a good idea.”

Reality
This one is my own fault. In my brimming idealism, I thought I could sit down with people and convince them that taking a personal loan to pay for a credit card debt is a bad move. I thought I could convince them that sacrificing instant gratification in favour of long term investment is doable.

The truth? I don’t know how people manage to survive. The same people who said they did not have enough money for savings would ask if they could qualify for yet another personal loan/credit card/house loan/car loan.

It was a bitter realisation that I couldn’t save people from themselves. I liken my plight to doctors who try their best to save patients, only to find that they are taking ‘traditional supplements’ that is actually aggravating their condition.

Nowadays, I only give advice when someone asks me for it.

 

7. YOU HAVE THE FREEDOM TO WORK AT ANY HOUR

What else is extra time for if not for sleeping in?

Reality
You have to earn this freedom. If you join the sales force as a newbie, you have to work from the bottom, which means working harder than anyone else to show impressive numbers. If your performance is sustained after one to two years, only then you will have some authority to come to an understanding with your boss on what kind of style of work will suit you. Be a revenue king/queen and let it do the talking for you.

 

8. CUSTOMERS ARE ONLY INTERESTED IN PRODUCTS

Lotsa creeps out there people. Beware.

Reality
I’ve always been a straight forward person. I treat each and every customer the way I would like to be treated myself.

But sometimes you come across creeps who only want to do and say creepy stuff, especially if you are female. Once, I travelled a long distance (1.5 hours) to meet a supposedly very busy customer who expressed strong interest in a product.

After spending an hour or so answering his questions, he signed the document and asked me out. I declined politely.

When I got back to the office, he called me to say he’s cancelling his purchase.

There was also this other incident where the customer insisted I watch a YouTube video of him playing the guitar without a shirt on. I’ll just leave it at that.

 

9. RACE DOES NOT MATTER

“Uh… I thought on Wednesdays we’re supposed to wear red.”

Reality
Even under the best circumstances, race does matter. This applies everywhere, not just in sales. Malaysia is special in a way that three major races can live together in relative harmony. While most people I know are not racist per se, we tend to stick to and favour our own race.

Which is completely understandable. People of our own race speak the same language, eat the same food, have the same upbringing and understand the same jokes. If you are an outsider, you will obviously be at a disadvantage. For example the Malays at work would sometimes joke in a dialect not familiar to my Chinese friend. Sometimes I had to play translator. And when I go out with a huge group of Chinese people, they would start talking very quickly in Mandarin or Cantonese and a kind Chinese friend would have to translate for me. Indians speak English all the time so I don’t really have any language barrier there. I don’t grudge anyone for doing any of the above. When people socialise, they want to be in a comfortable crowd and speak in a language they are comfortable in.

I’m not saying Malays should always stick to Malays, Chinese to Chinese and Indians to Indians. Personally, I have about an equal number of Malay, Chinese and Indian friends so being among people of different races does not faze me. My point is, if you’re not used to it, at least you can go into it with eyes open wide. Unless you’re the type of person who can blend in with any group, give this a good long thought when choosing where to work. How much it matters depends on how well you think you can manage these differences in culture.

 

Conclusion
To wrap this up, the points above are some of the unseen sides of working in sales. To be sure, every job has its pros and cons. Personally I think more people should come out and describe them for the benefit of potential newcomers.

Sales is still an exciting place to be if you can work hard and smart, enjoy the excitement of closing sales, know how to manage different personalities and can think quickly on your feet. Genuine relationships do exist with co-workers and customers alike. In sales, your communication skills will grow exponentially. You will develop thick skin to survive countless rejections and if you’re that good, the pay is very good as well. Now if after reading this article, you’re still raring to go, all the best to you!

At least now you know what kind of questions to ask your interviewer!



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