why won't you answer my question...how many sales have you made so far?

Also I don't agree with not leaving a message. I can't tell you how many times I've called people a second time, and they reference my voicemail in some capacity. I typically won't answer a number I don't know, but I definitely won't answer the second time they call if they couldn't be bothered to leave a message the first time around.

120 calls? Are you paying them for one hour of work a day? There is no way you are going to get 2-3 appointments out of 12 contacts per day. You will be lucky to get 2-3 a week. I would expect to get complete contact info on half of the calls. You can get that from the receptionist, or you may be able to just buy it from infoUSA.

Ah - Sorry. Thought I had that in the last post but didn't.

So far I have zero sales. I've only been employed for two weeks though . I have three months to make three sales. Then I'll have to make one sale a month to keep my job. If not, I get the b00t.

lol. no. I'm paying them for 40 hours per week (~$160/wk). It's only one person making calls. I told the guy that I would prefer quality over quantity and that's the average he gave me. As for the call-to-appointment and appointment-to-close ratio. Who knows. I shouldn't really say anything until I have some real numbers to work with.

so far you are making a ton of very poor assumptions, based on zero actual sales made. Then there is the fact you are outsourcing the sales calls YOU were hired to make (so you have no idea if they are legit or fabricated to justify the time........same as your task, hmmmmm) I see that b00t coming sooner than later.

I used them at my last position. They made outbound calls for me for every sales lead that came in and would reply to the e-mails if they came in from 9PM - 9AM. So I know they are "legit".

I wasn't hired to make the calls - I was hired to build reoccuring revenue. Whether that means he pays me $50/hr to call and sell. Or whether he pays me $10/hr and I hire 8 more people at $5/hr. The end goal is to build the business. That's what I'm trying to do. Not sit back for three months and pretend to do work and collect a paycheck.

my point was YOU need to do the initial work, to establish the parameters for your outbounders to follow. That means performing the lowly grunt work, in the beginning. From those leads you develop to the closed business, you can then use your skills to establish a system that will generate those recurring revenue streams.

Why, because every market segment is different, and without the front line intel you're driving blind. New district managers at Starbucks are required to work their stores counters. But, its your decision, best of luck.

This thread is funny.

OP: I am struggling at my job, anyone have any tips?
Everyone else: Stop being lazy and make more calls
OP: I hired some indian for $4/hr to do my job. How'd I do?

Ok so first off. I'm still making calls, but I'm focused on calling the people that I've worked with directly in the past at the other company I was with. Even though I'm not going to be the first one they speak with. Every potential customer always has way to reach me either by phone, e-mail, or skype.

Second, today sucked a big 'ol nutter. In the last paragraph I stated that I would be able to focus on the people I've worked with in the past (from a tech side). Many of clients I've stayed up til late hours and lost many of my friday and saturdays for these guys. They had my direct cell and wouldn't be afraid to use it.

It was a real dildo up the butt-hole when they were a dick to you then and are a dick to you now - without even remembering who you are. Geez. I'll take the advice from earlier in the thread and not let it get to me ... Def. hitting a long run up tonight!

Though on a positive note it was fun and easy talking to people that I have before and their interest in our products. Most productive day yet:

10 appointments all set for tomorrow!

--

EDIT: I just realized a lot of what I typed really made me sound like a whinny little B-I-T-C-H. I'm sure a lot of people would kill to sit in A/C all day with the worst thing that can happen to them being somebody that doesn't remember them. Though I'm happy that I can get this all out there. Very therapeutic and what not.

Didn't really work to much last week, but I'm probably going to pull a 35-40 hr week. Good news is that I'm starting to get some appointments and I'm able to work on my sales process. Bad news is that I still have zero sales.

Right now I have a guy that has 9 rooftops and I'm working on selling him. If I can nail it then I'm banking an extra 1350 reoccuring per month and earning the company close to 100k per year. My initial goals were to put the company at 1 million in extra revenue per year.

Work starts.in a few hours and I'm hopin' for the best.

So even though there was absolutely no interest in this thread at first. I figure I at least owe some sort of update to it. Just in case somebody comes across it months or years from now and is in the same thought process I was. So here's the update:

It's almost been 2.5 months and I haven't sold one gosh darn thing. The contact that I signed says that I need to sell at least one item a month and if I don't .. I'm fired. lol. Been working around 30 hours and here's what I've tried..
- Cold Calling: This got old after the first week. Honestly hope I never have to do this again. Getting ahold of anybody that understands "technology" is a pain. Let alone somebody that wants to be sold something.
- Outsourcing my calls it India: Call me stupid, but I thought this would work. Well, it didn't. Silly me. Long story short, usually what would happen is he would get an 'appointment' with the person and they would think our product is to expensive or they just didn't have a need for it. I'm not fully convinced this wouldn't EVER work, but in my case it didn't
- Last but not least: LinkedIn: Believe it or not, this works the best to get ahold of people! I signed-up for a LinkedIn pro account for like $499/mo. This allows me to not only send messages to my '1st connections' (direct contacts), but ANYBODY - General Managers, Presidents, Owners. You get up to 25 of those a month. If they don't respond .. you get a 'message credit' back.

The biggest problem I faced for the first two months was getting a hold of the 'decision maker'. To many people pretend like the are in-charge, but when it comes time to it .. They aren't the guy (or gal) signin' their name on the paper. So no matter whether they are the e-commerce director, bdc manager, IT director - They all report to the General Manager or Owner and don't have the authority to sign a contact or cut a check.

Other problems include, but are not limited to:
1. Lack of experience: Not saying I'm a "selling king", but I'm a hell of alot better than I used to me.
2. Networking: God I wish I would have used LinkedIn before, thought of connecting through my old hook ups in the industry, and if I could have built a lead generation website - Probably would have been a goldmine for leads.
3. Product originality: Here's the thing. Our product posts vehicles on Craigslist and there' 50000000000000 other vendors that do it as well. There's plenty of stuff we do better, but getting them to see that is SOOO difficult. I've came up with rebutals for everything, but at the end of the day they see our product the same as what they are already doing, but with us it would be -- 3x to 4x more.

With all that said, even if I did already have the experience and a lead generation website I'm still not sure I could sell anything. Because of the last statement. It needs to be something original.

That segue's me into my last statement, I'm actually moving to a company the 1st of September to do the same thing -- Selling. I've known the guy for 4-5 years and he knows exactly what I've been through and knows my experience. I'll get to work from home and will practically be the same gig. Only it's a new idea to the industry and is actually pretty cool.

Other than that, I still do have a few 'interested parties' of the current process, but just can't see to seal the deal. I'd say there's a 50/50 shot I'm still employed with this company starting October 1st.

Toodles.

Would the service work for other types of dealerships (RV, Boat, motorcycle, ATV etc)?

It seems like it'd be easier to sell to them.

In theory it could, but we would have to get it in a file format that is compatible. For example, right now we receive a file that contains: Year, Make, Model, Description, Image URLs, etc. Most ATV and RV dealers don't have a system per say that they input everything into that can be accessed.

For example, car dealers have standard DMS (Dealer Management Systems) such as ADP, Reynolds and Reynolds, AutoMate, etc. So there's plenty of companies out there that will pullin this information, VIN decode it and clean up the data, from there they send it to AutoTrader, Cars.com, and people like us.

So yes, in theory it could be done, but it wouldn't exactly be 'turn-key'. Most of them wouldn't see to much value in it because, for one, they don't hold a lot of inventory at RV and ATV dealers .. to my knowledge. Motocycles. I don't think they really hold to much gross on those. So there's not a lot of profit in them.

Do I think it would work? Hell yeah I do. I think it would pay for itself and more if somebody would 'give us a shot', but in this economy people are all about savin' a buck and this industry is super old school. So asking them to drop 1k monthly on a product that they didn't have before it's absurd to most General Managers. The statement I always hear (which makes me wanna punch a baby in the face) is:

"We were selling before and we didn't have a craigslist product .. "

If any rv, atv, motocycle dealers are reading this. Feel free to chime in obv..

ABC

LOL I saw this ad on CL and asked for more information. Glad to know you aren't selling anything so I don't have to waste my time with it. EDIT: and you paid 499/mo for that linked in thing? was that a typo? If you sold one thing a month for that dealership thing, or 2 at lower prices, you wouldn't even break even?