There is a company that sells high-end wine over the phone. I worked there for four days and quit out of total frustration as I made literally hundreds of cold calls with leads provided by this company. The leads were all bad leads, meaning they were leads of consumers who were either bible belt christians, muslims, AA members, or Korean doctor offices. None of these people drink, and even the very best sales person in the world would never have been able to sell them because they dont drink and don't even have acqauintances that do.
The interesting thing is that there was a "clique" of about five other people who were working at this company who were selling cases of this high end wine right and left. They were selling at least five cases of wine a day, some more. In the five days i was there I actually observed one guy sell $20,000 worth of wine, and I am not kidding. The commission on the wine sales is 20%, so this guy made $4,000 in commissions in one single day! Now this little clique of people have been working for this company from between four and eight years. These people are making an average of $10,000 plus a month in commissions, and sometimes closer to $20,000!
I know this sounds ridiculously high, but I swear it is the truth.
The atmosphere at this company can only be characterized as being out of some Fellini film. They play rock music FULL BLAST in the work area. Half the time the wine brokers are playing around riding bikes around between the desks, or shooting plastic blow darts at each other, or playing "soft ball" with a plastic bat and a rubber ball. Half the day they are just goofing off, drinking the wines they are selling, and not working whatsoever. Then around two in the afternoon, they get busy and call up customers on their huge data base of past customers, and telling them that they just got in some marvelous new wine; they don't try to sell them, they KNOW they will buy, because the wine is so good, and the clients are so rich, that they think nothing of buying three or four cases of wine costing between $400 and $800 a case. This really is scrumptious stuff, and so it isn't hard to end up selling close to $40,000 and more of the wine between 2 and 5 in the afternoon for this small clique of wine brokers.
In contrast, as I said, i have no good leads, and all i am doing is getting rejection after rejection, which is what ALL new hires get. What happens is all the new hires, and they do hire a small group of new people once a month who all quit after a week for lack of sales and total frustration.
Now, i think there is something very "fishy" going on here. The five people who are making over ten grand a month never change, and I dont think the new hires are meant to succeed. For some perhaps "legal" purpose I think this company must "pretend" to hire people every month, and they know they will all fail, and after a week its back to business as usual for these highly paid people in the clique.
I have developed an obsession for this company and working for them. I innocently had not analyzed what I have related about and chalked it all up to me not being very good at sales, so I went out and tried a bunch of sales jobs, and read a great deal about sales, subscribed to wine newsletters, and salesmanship newsletters, and I KNOW i am an outstanding sales person.
I tried to be rehired but they put me off with promises of getting in touch with me and hiring me back, but it is obvious they just wont hire back anyone who has any knowledge of their company because they just might succeed. This is what I mean...I now know EXACTLY how to BUY some perfect leads for selling this high end wine. I am in contact with a top lead generator who can get me precisely the leads i need to be as successful as this exclusive little club would be and I would end up making tons and tons of money, just like they are doing.
They are not stupid people and know that anyone who has spent five days working there struggling with total rejection yet observing the five others making tremendous amounts of sales would be asking themselves how they could duplicate this. At least some people would be wanting what these people are making and trying to figure it out. The rest of the new hires probably are just running for the hills, glad to be out of such a wacko work environment.
I don't really know exactly what I am asking here. I guess I want to get an answer from someone who is very, very sales savvy and knows all the ins and outs of businesses and the scams out there, and to confirm for me that what they are doing is scamming the poor new hires, driving half out of their minds with useless leads for the sole purpose of getting them to quit, so they don't lose even one crumb of the pie.
I KNOW they won't hire me back, but there is a friend who I am thinking of going into partnership with. What we are planning on doing is investing about a thousand dollars is leads that are totally geared to sell. I won't bother going in to the exact profile i am looking for, but suffice to say I am convinced with these good leads, that my partner could get hired as a "new hire," and instead of failing like virtually one hundred percent of the new hires, he would SUCCEED. So if he did, would they let him into the exclusive group? or would they find a way to fire him, even if he were generating ten sales a day in his first day or two. I am wondering if it is worth our investment, because it would work, meaning, he would be able to sell as much as they are selling. Then, what we would do is split the money he made between the two of us, meaning we could easily see a couple thousand each a week in income.
Have you ever heard of businesses like this before. I know there are tons of scamming sales jobs out there. For insance, I had one job where we set appointments for time share presentations. We were never paid the commissions for the people we booked for these presentations. Our managers would tell us they were "no shows" when in fact they either did show up or were not sent their invitations to show up. That scam I quit after learning how I should have been making a thousand a week, and ended up making about 2 hundred a week, because i was not being paid for the people i signed up and was forbidden to keep the phone numbers of those people so i couldnt check to see if they did or did not attend. I did sign up a friend, and I know for a fact she was never sent her invitation and i didnt get credit for the booking, and i am sure it happened constantly, so i know scams are probably more common than not in sales which is why sales has such a sleaze bag reputation. Any input you would have would be appreciated, but most especially could you give me your imput on what I have described about this wine company and whether it would be worth it to try to get in on it by buying great leads. Would we succeed or would be also be fired. Is this exclusive clique unwilling for tax or whatever shady purposes unwilling to let anyone else in. Thx
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