Strategic Market Solutions, LLC

1. Being a telemarketer isn’t just calling people at 8 p.m. trying to sell them something. When people think of telemarketing, they don’t typically think of what we do. We do consumer telemarketing as well, but my company’s focus is more geared toward business-to-business telemarketing. We make calls for a company that has a service they want another company to purchase from them. The vast majorities of our clients happen to be in insurance and in payroll, and they have us reach out to prospects that fit their criteria and schedule appointments for them.

2. Some people will assume you work for some shady operation that’s just trying to scam people. When I first got my job, there were a few remarks like, “Don’t call me at home,” or, “Make sure if you call me, you don’t call me at 8 o’clock, I have to feed my kids,” or, “Don’t try to sell me anything.” And when people ask me what I do for a living and I say I work for a telemarketing company, they’re just like, “Oh…” until I explain it to them. A lot of people think telemarketing is like a boiler room operation or that we’re out to scam people over the phone. We’re definitely not scamming anyone, and it’s like any other sales job, only it’s over the phone.

3. Even if you have a sales background, you won’t be completely prepared with how hard it is to sell something over the phone. I had a background in sales and being able to sell something always came really easy to me. I worked for a publishing company selling ad space for phonebooks, so my sales experience had typically been face-to-face. When you’re trying to sell something over the phone, the person on the other end doesn’t know who I am, they don’t know anything about our company, and so it actually was kind of a struggle for me the first couple of months. It took me two months to bring on my first client and it was stressful. But I learned a lot from the other people in my office and my sales manager in the beginning by listening to how they pitched, how they talked, and what worked for them.

Read more: 11 Things I Wish I Knew Before I Became a Telemarketer