First week on the floor. First sales role. Full of optimism and thinking the sky is the limit. Within the first six months of the role I was consistently out performing my KPI's of 4 deals a week, with other more experienced individuals soon starting to ask what my process was and how I was consistently over achieving. I couldn't wait to walk in everyday and close more deals; this is what I was living for. At this point, the focus wasn't too heavy on the dials (maybe 40 a day) and social selling through different channels was how the majority of the top performers and myself were closing deals. Senior management didn't care because if we were bringing in deals, that's all that mattered. Heck, we could have been contacting prospects via pigeon mail and they wouldn't have batted an eyelid as long as it bought in 4 deals a week. I found my groove, and the commission was rolling in. Life is good.
Que Christmas, the cogs of GDS group started to turn. More and more rules and regulations were imposed. 150 dials here, 5 pitches a day there that have to last 5 minutes each. This was turning more and more into a glorified telesales role and the creative flair that myself and others used through other channels were restricted. The very thing that was bringing in 4+ deals a week was now the cardinal sin. The whole floor was required to read off the same script and spend 80% of the day cold calling people who are not interest at all in attending the event; resulting in borderline harassment (apologies to all the executives I called). Above all else, the prospects being sourced by GDS's data team in Kosovo were below average, which meant I ended up calling 100 + people a day that weren't relevant to the product we were selling.
Then it started to click. I realised that this whole game was based on luck. Of course, management will say you make your own luck and the more prospects you reach, the more deals you convert. However, there's only a certain amount of executives that tally up with the requirements of your engagement you're trying to fill and if the shoe doesn't fit, It's like flogging a dead horse. This meant that there was a huge inconsistency in performance as one minute you're put on an A* campaign that has 1000's of leads to tap into and the next, you're trying to get strictly CIO's to attend an engagement in some obscure region. This was evident when certain campaigns had to be cancelled. This meant there was no opportunity to hone your sales skills as one minute you've got prospects saying yes with no objection, and the next, you've got an impossible campaign that you haven't had experience of selling before and haven't built skills to develop. But I guess that's what happens when you become good. They challenge you. But without realistic support. This wasn't our fault; it was Business Development guys flogging un-deliverable events to the sponsors to hit their quotas, and then we were left to pick up the pieces try to fill these engagements. I started to realise 'imagine selling a product to prospects that already use something similar to what I'm trying to promote'. But instead we were just interrupting executives days with an engagement that they really had no business attending.
I guess all of this was the straw that broke the camels back. Ultimately, someone who thrived in the role and rode off the luck was finally broken. The harsh reality is that the job is a short cycle. There is no way on gods earth that you could realistically stay within that role for more than 2 years before burning out. That's exactly why they hire 20+ Delegate Acquisition Executives every few months, because it's the revolving door of GDS.
This is coming from someone who actually grew within the role and gained success. However, I came to realise that if you cannot spend your day doing the same monotonous tasks everyday, this isn't the role for you. Please value yourself and your worth before applying for this role. Unless you really can luck out and spend your day hitting the phone and spending your evening on LinkedIn scrolling through literally hundreds of pages of prospects, this isn't for you.
