Review by Damian Brockway – Managing Director of Pulse with 25 years sales and marketing experience including more than a decade of senior management experience with some major blue chip organisations.

What makes a successful telesales person?

What makes a good telesales firm?

What constitutes a good telesales call?

What exactly is telesales?

Why use telesales people or companies?

Why use agency telesales resource?

“I have to admit right at the start of my review that I am most definitely biased.

Having started my career with Canon UK selling capital equipment business to business and worked for more than three years cold calling both via telesales and door to door I learnt the hard way but quickly discovered just how much a good telesales person may achieve.

My first day constituting one of the toughest of my life where we were given approximately 30 minutes sales training on what was called the “reverse sales pyramid” which basically teaches the more sales calls you do the more you are likely to get out of it, then given a Yellow Pages and told to get on with it!

But what does make a successful telesales person?

I think a whole number of things. Firstly superb listening skills. A good telemarketer should spend more time listening than talking, once he or she has established their credentials.

Secondly a thick skin or very determined personality. Handling rejection is no easy thing unless you are very strong willed and resolute.

Thirdly work rate. I often tell a true and very good story that highlights just this. In my early twenties after my Canon experience, I joined a sales recruitment company. This company sold business to business and operated across nearly all industry platforms. At the time the company was the market leader and only one of two such major companies in existence (now there are thousands of such companies).

I worked with this sales recruitment company for nearly six years – starting as a new business consultant, then a consultant and then a manager.

Eventually this led me to become their youngest director – but during my second year I was promoted to management for the first time.