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Submitted by Alistair Lawrie

I had a sales manager who lied about being able to run a telesales team on his CV then was specifically employed by my old firm to run a telesales team.

They had a recruitment drive and we got another 4 sales staff, other than me, who were told, by him, that their OTE would be 25k a year but once they had taken up their posts they discovered their OTE was actually only 16k. They promptly stopped working and started looking for other work.

Anyway, in order to make sure they didn't get any hassle they made sure they always hit their call targets (75 calls a day, 2 hours on the phone, 90 seconds average call time) but they never sold anything. I concentrated on making sales and didn't concentrate on my call target, the end result being I sold more than the other 4 put together each month but in the eyes of my sales manager was making too many calls and not spending long enough on each one, hence the disciplinary.

In the meeting I was asked to explain why I was spending less time on average than everyone else. I told the truth, that I had repeatedly asked for sales training as I had moved from customer services so wasn't sure of what I was doing but it had never been forthcoming despite being repeatedly promised (sales training after this meeting was him sending me an email saying "You can't aim a duck to death!"). Also, I was outselling everyone else. I was told that we were discussing call stats and not to change the topic.

I pointed out that all the other sales staff were listening to Interactive Voice Response Systems, waiting for ansafones, chatting to receptionists, calling fax machines etc whereas as soon as I heard an IVR I hit 0, went straight through to the receptionist, found out the info' I required then moved on to the next call. I pointed out this was effective due to my higher sales. I was again told that this conversation wasn't about sales and that it was my responsibility to spend longer on the phone. Again I pointed out that I needed sales training and had yet to be given any. Again I was told that I should already know how to sell as I was in a sales team.

So, he insisted that I needed to make some serious improvements and we would reconvene in a month. I explained that in that case I was going to pull all the tricks my other colleagues would be pulling and therefore my sales would go down. Meeting ended.

A month later we reconvened. I had been doing exactly what I had said I would do. I had specifically wasted my time listening to automated messages in order to increase my average call time which had caused a massive drop in my sales for that month.

My manager congratulated me on the extra hard work I had put in as my call stats had radically improved and that he wanted me to keep it up from now on. The dumbest part of all this was that the personnel manager had minuted a meeting where I said I was going to specifically sell less to achieve an admin target and I was congratulated for doing so.

Other examples: he deleted all the templated letters off of our CRM package before writing new ones. Once he had the new templates he asked IT to replace them at which point IT said it was an impossible task. It took 2 years to get them replaced and only after I finally complained to the managing director.

We would have new telesales staff employed but not given a pc or phone to work from. The record was 2 weeks for a new member of staff staring at a wall, and getting paid for it, before they got any kit.

I was taken aside and told that everybody else would be going to the exhibition for some sales experience but I would have to stay in the office as I had a ponytail. His argument was that "some people in our business, not me though have issues with men with ponytails. If you were working in Marketing there would be no problem"!