Telemarketing has fallen out of vogue in recent years what with the national Do Not Call list. But even then, there is no failsafe defense against telemarketers. Many people do not know that if you do business, with someone, anyone, they have the right to call you afterward, despite whatever consumer safeguards, you the government (and even your mommy) have put in place to protect you. It is all but certain that every time you buy something using your credit card, the calls from smooth sounding scumbags, will come again, as predictably, surely as a bloated carcass in July’s heat will draw flies.

The reason I am making this distinction is that I want you to know that there will always be a demand for a steady stream of telemarketers, but the industry prefers to hire new faces; freshly dropped out of high school. Any telemarketing manager will tell you privately that the people under his oversee are not loyal sled dogs to be fed, they are tires to be changed and the advancement structure is full of all sorts of checks and balances to make sure that the floor is always filled with the most skilled but underpaid voices at all times (more on this later).

Your First Day

The dress code for telemarketers is as varied as the crappy goods and services they push, but this is one case where you should always dress one level better than what is expected. If you are selling car parts out of a barn in Forest Lake MN (As I have done) you should wear a polo to best your co-workers jeans and shirt ensemble and if there is actually a dress shirt policy at your job, then you should always wear a tie as well. This might seem strange because your customer, can’t actually see you, but there is no future on the calling floor, and a bad month is always fatal.

Think you can’t have a bad couple of weeks? Well you will, and you will be fired or (more likely) driven to quit, every time. Moreover, because only two jobs exist on a calling floor (Phone rep and manager) there is little room to grow professionally. This is why you should dress nice and hope to be considered for management as soon as possible. While big centers fire scores of people every day (Think about it, won’t you) the manager positions are seldom vacant, and it is a great job. You do nothing all day but listen to calls, run reports and check productivity, all of which can be done with a single press of the buttons from your desk. Granted, you still have to hire and maintain a crew, but this is done for you. 

The Heavy Crown of Foam

You see, because it is a hard cold numbers game, you only counsel people who aren’t doing well. But because it is also reality based, there might be any number of reasons why someone isn’t doing well on the board at any given juncture; unfamiliarity of product, wrong voice tone for current promotion, or just bad luck. But you need not concern yourself with that, if someone isn’t making sales or getting numbers you always harass them.

You listen to their calls both privately and while practically sitting on their lap, you attack their posture and single out their every pause, stammer or “Umm” to embarrass them and make sure that they will never let it happen again. It doesn’t matter if they were your best phone sales rep for three weeks straight, failure to be seen publicly humiliating them after a company approved intervention schedule (Often two weeks) will only lead to a similar dialog in the site mangers office, only with you as the suited imbecile who stops his tears with his own foam headset.

The Numbers Game You Can’t Win

Of course it isn’t all bad. If you are doing well in the top 5%, otherwise known as the type of employee who makes several times your paid wage in soliciting new business on the phone, the call center will tolerate all manner of behavior from you that they wouldn’t otherwise condone, extreme horseplay, off-color humor and will allow you some minor truancy.  But this is only a short term fix. Allow me to explain, why your own success can be used against you and why the clock begins to run against you, the minute you are hired to a phone bank:

Phone Work=Phoney Security

As any other job, telemarketing offers merit raises, depending on your ratio of sales/appt. sets to calls made. For example after 6 months, if your productivity increases you will be due a fifty cents raise, with the promise of another fifty cents raise in 6 months. Is this attainable? Yes. But because the raises are usually slotted for six months, there comes a time where you will either be incapable of increasing your productivity any further regardless of skill, (the amount of people you may speak to on a different day does not change, over the long haul).

This leaves two possible outcomes for your employ at the calling center (depending on company policy), none of them good:

1. You are running behind the level of productivity, the levels of expectation set be generations of employees who sat in your chair before you, most of them already fired.
2. A - You hit all the goals and quotas, but income will crap out after a year and there will be no raises, because you could not produce more, as there are only a finite number of calls that any one solicitor can make regardless of skill or persuasive ability, especially if they utilize an autodialer system. They will never admit this.

   OR

   B - They will continue to give you raises, because you hit the bare minimums and company policy still allows for raises after occasional reviews regardless of actual product being sold. This sound like a good thing, at first until you realize that while you have good numbers and always light up the board, they are spending too much on you; on an employee who possesses an easily teachable skill with a short learning curve. This should make you very afraid.

   Moreover, only really crappy work enviroments tends to pay you raises that you are eligible for by just continuing to exist; survive in a place, such as a bill collector. You can be sure that if continuing to survive, is something worth paying you increasing wages for, it is doing something that you will truly end “earning” one way or another, and by that I mean squandering it on booze or therapy anyway. Anything to keep the happy phone voice coming out of your mouth for the span of an eight hour shift, and the handgun from being thrust into it after hours…

Further explanation of the individual fates is unnecessary and ponderous. If you fall short of your goals, you will be fired. If you meet your goals for too long, but do not increase your ability to make more money for the company for what they pay you; the same ratio for gain as a fresh, off the street worker, you will be fired. Of course, some places might keep you anyway, usually the places mentioned in 2A. that will only promise to pay you more based your increasing ability to perform, knowing fully well that there are limits to how much any human being can talk on the phone in a given hour regardless of skill.

Most people in their mid thirties and above who telemarket, work for a certain telemarketing company for any length of time will have made peace with the fact that they will never see regular performance based raises, because the next level of accomplishment is just out of reach, always out of reach. Of course, during the company reviews, the managers will encourage you to raise your numbers, to reach that next pay grade, even if no living person on the calling floor has ever done so in history. 

Sadly, these are the only types of calling centers able to provide lifetime employment, because they balance the monthly quotas with the unattainable goals which keep their crews working and hopeful, even as people appear from nowhere and old friends disappear forever every day around them for the entire length of their employ. For sheer financial gain, telemarketing pays good money at first, but quickly bottoms out as the skilled phone solicitor quickly becomes the victim of his own success, where there is nowhere to go but down.

To Sell your Soul, Press 1 Now

Now it has been proved that most telemarketing jobs end by being fired, one might wonder how it will happen to them? The answer is, for doing the same things they have always done, that everybody does every day. On a calling floor the posted rules of conduct are largely ignored, people swear, say things that are not known to be true and the customers themselves are actively discussed in anything but a businesslike manner.

Managers themselves often engage in profanity, horseplay and outlandish childish behavior to  give the illusion of brinkmanship, being one of the crew, being a friend a proverbial “man of the people” that any phone rep can talk to at any one time, who in reality, only invites people into his always crummy door less office he shares with countless other managers.to write them up or fire them.

Aside from the Do Not Call List which is always obeyed (and only then because it carries a $10,000 fine for the owners) the social laws of a calling floor are a strange recess playground indeed for many people who couldn’t finish high school, that is long as you star shines.  Should your numbers be down for that second week, should you recently be given a merit raise and now be paid $12.25 for a job that new hires do for $9.00 you will be fired, for not coding a call, for taking a bathroom break without raising your hand like a child, for doing anything else that you did when you were fresh faced and full of hope, back when your voice sounded lifelike and seductive, not tired and bitter as it does now, my how have you have grown in seven months!

Think You Can Manage?

So you see, there is only one way to survive telemarketing, and that is to get a manager gig as soon as possible. All the usual methods for corporate advancement apply, never be late, always be courteous and always be cheerful, even as another days worth abuse from the customers collects, festers in your very soul and makes you unfit do do anything else, but smile and dial, and die a little more each day on the inside.

But there are other ways to grease the process, don’t make friends with the other employees beyond casual acquaintance, never engage in profanity and other horseplay, even on your breaks, and always greet your managers with a smile, and continue to dress above your pay grade as mentioned with step one. At of the powers that be will recognize you as a person who is destined for something more, or they will spot you at once as a duplicitous fake, little asshole who would sell your own mother to a Mexican brothel for another number by your name on the big dry erase board, either way you have shown you have what it takes will surely make an effective call- center manager.

Just don’t ever call me twice, you little asshats. I know ways to torture telemarketers that makes what I do to the car salesmen in the previous article seem like sweet commerce indeed. Perhaps that should be a future article, just another attempt for me to give back to a world I love so much…

-Sinferno