THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, October 1, 1996 TAG: 9610010269
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SERIES: SALES JOBS IN HAMPTON ROADS
Nearly everything we buy is sold to us by someone. That's not
changing. In fact, sales jobs continue to be among the fastest-growing
professions in Hampton Roads and Virginia. This installment in our
series on salespeople gives a behind-the-scenes look at a
telemarketer.
SOURCE: BY LON WAGNER, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 129 lines
Colette Smith loves to talk.
She's talking right now. She's on the phone talking to someone she's never met and probably never will. And she's asking for money.
Smith, a telemarketer at ICT Group in Chesapeake, snaps her fingers, letting her supervisor know she's got a potential sale. She's got to keep the customer on the line until a verifier can come over and double-check it.
Four of her co-workers have sales on the line, so it will be more than a minute before a supervisor gets to her. That's OK. Smith loves this part of selling. Talking about whatever she wants.
Smith tells the customer she'd love to take a vacation and just drive all over Europe. But she's going to wait until her kids go to college, then she's going to travel the world.
The would-be buyer can't see her, but Smith is professionally dressed in a flowing blue skirt, matching blue shoes, shiny aqua earrings and a blue hair clip. Even though the customers can't see her, she wants to look good. Look good, feel good; feel good, sound good; sound good, sell some insurance.
She rolls back in her chair to see when the verifier is coming. It'll be another minute. No problem. Her calm voice never reveals the chaos around her. She rambles on.
Smith often talks to customers about her life. She's a single mom, living in Portsmouth. She's got two teenagers and a 2-year-old.
If she hears a baby crying in the background, she'll tell the customer about hers. Talk about the ``terrible twos.''
``When they want to talk, it makes it easy,'' she says. ``Most of them do, they want to talk. We're talking to people who are home all day.
``If you want to talk to me, it's fine. I'd do it all day, people always tell me. I talk. I just talk. When the verifier come over, they tell me they think I can keep talking forever.''
Arthur ``Red'' Motley, an advertising salesman for Collier's magazine in the 1930s, said the 15 magic words of selling are:
``Know your customer. Know your product. See a lot of people. Ask all to buy.''
Telemarketers talk to thousands. They ask them all to buy. Usually, they're offering credit card holders some kind of add-on insurance: first three months free, then the card will be billed.
Smith and the other telemarketers who sit in the calling stations in Chesapeake are big reasons why door-to-door selling is dying. At ICT's 80 calling stations in Chesapeake, they can reach more than 10,000 people a day. The same number of door-to-door salespeople would each have to knock at 125 houses a day to reach that many people.
ICT's two dozen calling centers include three that opened this decade, in Virginia Beach, Norfolk and Chesapeake. All told, ICT can place about 20 million phone calls a month.
Some days, ICT is the highest-volume caller on MCI's network, says Jack Kerins, senior vice president of systems and technology.
Sales by outbound telemarketers in 1995 totaled $385 billion, according to the Direct Marketing Association, a Washington trade group.
It's not easy making all those calls. It's not possible to be happy-go-lucky every day, Smith says. Or to put ``a smile in your voice,'' as quality control supervisor Darlene Long advises.
ICT's computerized monitoring shows that half of all calls won't be answered, will be busy or the wrong number. Another 20 percent will click onto answering machines. Ten percent will ask them to call back. Only 20 percent, at best, will reach somebody who can buy.
Just a small percentage of those will even let the telemarketers finish their scripted pitch.
The mantra in telemarketing, much like other kinds of sales, is ``don't take rejection personally,'' but that's almost impossible.
``There's no other way to take it,'' says Jack Falvey, a sales management professor at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. ``It's not like in baseball where you go three for 10 and you're in the Hall of Fame. In sales, you might go two for 100.''
The frequency of rejection is why the supervisors have ``spiffs,'' or little drawings in which a telemarketer wins $10.
Rejection drives the superstitions of some telemarketers, who sit in the same booth every day if they're on a roll. It's why Smith enjoys it so much when she gets somebody who wants to talk - because the longer they stay on the line, the more likely they are to buy.
``If you get too stressed out that you can't work,'' she says, ``you go to the bathroom to vent or you joke about what the people say on the other end. Then you realize, if you can't take rejection, you can't do the job.''
The slamming phones and don't-bother-me's come fast and furious every time one of the TV news shows does a program on some boiler-room telemarketing scam, says Nick Lindsey, an insurance agent.
``You get called a lot of names that I don't want to repeat,'' says Lindsey.
Despite it all, telemarketing sales are expected to grow to $600 billion by 2000.
That's because technology is letting outfits like ICT zero in on potential customers like never before. First of all, the telemarketers don't actually dial phone numbers.
Everyday, ICT transmits that day's calling list from its computers in Langhorne, Pa., to each of the call centers. A predictive dialing machine screens out calls that ring and get no answer.
When someone at home lifts a phone to answer, the computer ships that call to an available telemarketer. The person's name, hometown and other information pops onto the telemarketer's screen just before the person answers.
ICT tracks 90 different categories - no answer, busy, deceased, don't call again, already enrolled and so on. If a complaint crops up later, they go back and find the telemarketer who made the sale.
Smith's been a telemarketer for eight years, the last two at ICT. Telemarketers at ICT get paid $6 to $8 an hour. The verifiers start at $8 to $10 an hour.
The way Colette Smith sees it, work is work. That's what she tries to get across to the people she calls.
``If you can get past the introduction and get them past the `Oh, another telemarketer' then you're doing your job,'' Smith says. ``You're working. That's what all of America does, works.
``I'm trying to take care of my kids and pay my bills.''
But once those kids are off to college, Smith's going to travel the world. In person. Not on the phone. MEMO: Coming Wednesday: A stockbroker's pitch is about more than today's
sale. ILLUSTRATION: [Color Photo]
LAWRENCE JACKSON
The Virginian-Pilot
Telemarketer Colette Smith loves to get customers talking. ``When
they want to talk, it makes it easy,'' she says. ``Most of them do.
. . We're talking to people who are home all day.'' by CNB