[jotucker1983]

I worked with a gentleman one time, who I will never forget, who made 80-100 calls per day and averaged 3-4 applications per day. He is still doing it to this day and is a dear personal friend of mine. He ONLY calls from the Yellow Pages. He only cold-calls, yet consistently funds 10-14 deals per month between equipment leasing and working capital deals. He is an animal at what we do, and he is my daily reminder that NOTHING is impossible.

It's not all about being a "numbers game" (although that is certainly the best way to manage a sales floor). Some people have incredibly high conversion rates because they know how to apply the right sound-bytes at the right time.

I don't know Zack lol, I think your buddy might be telling you one thing but doing another because, we are all in a competition of sorts.

There's no way that guy is randomly cold calling people out of the Yellow pages with no prior research, analysis, etc. on that data, with a conversion of 4 applications off of 100 cold-calls, just because he "sounds good" or "is very charismatic" or "has special sales abilities".

But this is what most Sales Managers want sales reps in general to think sales is based on. They want them to think you can have bad marketing plans, no market segments, no capital, no innovative products, and nothing else in relation to "business acumen", but all you need is to "sound very good" with a nice charismatic personality and use Zig Ziggler sales tips or NLP programming, and you can sell fire to hell. You can have a bad territory with bad leads, and still produce "a lot", if you can just quote, unquote "sell".

They say this because let's call it like it is, they don't want to invest in their external sales force. They promote this strategy while hiring hundreds of reps on 100% commission, knowing good and well that individually over 80% of them won't make enough to pay the rent, but collectively the entire group produces a good amount of volume for "the house".

All the while on the side for their internal reps that they pay base salaries to, they are supplying them leads off of a marketing budget or through referrals from strategic networks lol.