I have been 5 months doing outgoing cold calls, and I'm surviving. It's a pretty low pressure environment, with nice young people (I'm the oldest including the company owners), and there are no hard and fast targets. We each work for a different client company calling to try and make appointments for that company's salespeople, so we're not actually selling anything.
I work for a web portal selling hotel rooms in Europe, so I'm calling hotels in London and now Prague as well (most people there speak English luckily). There is no script, although I wrote myself one to have in front of me as a lucky talisman and to have something to prod my brain if I dry up. After a rocky start, I find that I'm actually quite good at it.
I'm the only English person in the office, so the boss can't listen in on me or anything like that, and I've recently been made head of international development (same money and duties as far as I can tell). Pay is ok, allowing me to live on 30 hours work a week. I have also shuffled this work around into 4 days, so I get a 3 day weekend. Yay.
The bad is that its fucking hot in the office now and we have no air conditioning. I have been almost nodding off half the time. I've stuck blu tac over the PC clock to make the time go quicker.
There is no promotion structure here as it's a small company, but I have been doing some extra work for the boss, research and translation, and that was for extra cash so there may be more opportunities in the future.
Go Phone monkeys!!! |
