Good and bad data can mean the difference between having good quality leads and as a result increased sales. Sales can be hard if the data you have is poor.
When I started my first sales job I must confess that I was looking forward to the commission payments as much as anything else. At the interview I had been wowed by all that impressive talk of earning enough bonus cash to buy a sports car or to eat in fancy restaurants every night.
Sadly, I only earned just about enough in my year there to pay for my bus fare to the office and some supermarket meals. I thought at the time that this was because I just wasn’t cut out for a sales job. However, when circumstances caused me to have to go back to this line of work later on I realized that I was actually pretty good at it and also thoroughly enjoyed it. I even started to earn enough commission to give up the bus and start driving to the office in a bit of style.
So what was wrong in that first job which went so badly? To be honest, I hate to pass the buck but I think that it was the fault of the poor quality data I was given. Even the best seller can only do so much with bad data and here are the problems which I now realise that it caused for me back then.
Difficult Phone Calls to the Wrong People
Starting off the phone conversation with a potential lead is always the toughest part of the selling process for me. I have tried a number of approaches over the years but they all need at least a bit of co-operation on the part of the person who I am speaking to. This is a lot easier when you know that your data is perfect and that you are speaking to the potential customer you want to deal with. I can remember a lot of really awkward calls back in that first job and most of it was due to me asking for people by the wrong name or calling the same person a number of times in the same week. Our contacts list was pretty horrendous but since I had never worked in this line of work before I didn’t know any better and had no idea about the importance of cleansing the data to make it more useful. Nowadays you can do this easily by going online and looking for a data cleansing firm to do it for you. Back then I just had to plough through the list and hope that the next name on it wasn’t the same guy who had shouted at me a couple of hours ago for phoning up and asking for a relative who had been dead for 5 years.
Not Enough Commission to Start Dreaming of a Better Life
I can handle difficult phone calls; yet if the rest of the job had been perfect I could have laughed off the bad moments and would have even have managed to raise a smile at some of the rude comments thrown at me as I accidentally called a woman Mr instead of Mrs or tried to sell over 50’s home insurance to a teenager. However, what I couldn’t deal with was the poor pay which my lack of sales caused. I soon discovered that my plans for moving up in the world were never going to come to fruition while I kept on picking up just the basic wage every month. I don’t want to sound like a mercenary but to be a successful salesperson I think that you have to be driven by the financial rewards to some degree. It is the desire to earn big money which can drive you to on to stay an extra hour and look for that extra sale before going home. It was only when I worked for a different company who gave me far more impressive lists of leads that I was able to show this side of my personality and drive my career forward. Things could have been so different for me in that first job if the company has used a data cleansing company like Data8 to give me the information I needed in order to get more sales. Still, at least I have learned from the bad times and can now use them to help me avoid making the same mistakes again in the future.
Jann Webb is a writer who believes that every company should use online data cleansing to ensure that their records are up-to-date and that your information is correct. This will save you a lot of time, money and embarrassment, giving your company a more professional outlook.
