For a test to be effective it doesn't have to be 100% effective every time. Just because it doesn't filter out rare individuums like yourself it doesn't mean it doesn't filter out 90% of them. If someone asks a question it's not unwise to assume they'll have a comment on that.
This is not the actual sales script. It's a script for the so-called canvassing call. Or so it was called back when I worked in boiler rooms cca. 2007. You hire a bunch of losers pay them no wage and all they do is telemarketing "can I call you with an opportunity?" i.e. you simply pre-qualify people for the real call. You show off some fake credibility, present yourself like a real business and says stuff like 'we only send couple of trade recommendations a year'. Then a week later the real sales guy give the prospect a hyped up call about this once in a lifetime opportunity.
Most people, about 95% making these first calls never make it higher. Either they quickly gather this job is a BS scam or they're too stupid to realize that and that stupidity often prevents them from going higher up. A few cynical ones like the manipulative aspects of it.
The job of a firm is to create illusion of excessive wealth and rockstar lifestyle of these "brokers" (strippers, cocaine, etc.) to attract some kind of talent. Most of the directors are faking the size of their wealth. E.g. coming to job on rented Bentley. They also lie about the nature of the job to hire people for "canvassing" as it doesn't matter how long you stay, if you only deliver 20 leads per first day and quit that's still a win. A bulk of the leads come from people who were tricked into the job and quit asap.
Most people who make it through are the ones cynical enough to stay around, then they harvest work of the ones who quit earlier. E.g. you collect leads, small clients etc. I have a friend who made it far, his lifestyle was just like Wolf of Wallstreet but more excessive. That movie btw. it's watered down - which is hard to believe for most as you'd expect Hollywood to overblow things.
There's telesales and telemarketing. In sales you close deals which requires skills. There's very few actual sales people in the market today, most just end up in this role because they can't get another job and then simply do manual marketing (adding people on linkedin, sending out cold emails, talking to non decision makers). Some are lucky to work in a company with great product and even there I see them slow down momentum. In fact I've seen a few startups miss their chance because they hired fake sales people early on.
Er, that distinction isn’t quite right. In any B2B enterprise company, there are SDRs (Sales Development Representatives) and AEs (Account Executives).
AEs are the sales people. They’re the ones who close the deals.
SDRs pretty much do nothing but qualify. If they close a deal, great, but sometimes that’s not even a good thing because it possibly could have been a bigger deal, if they had the AE script/training. But if they do well at qualifying as an SDR, they can often move up to AE, and so on.
But yes, SDRs are generally folks straight out of college or switching careers. It requires no prior knowledge, just the audacity and ability to cold call someone and be charismatic and personable enough to get them past the qualifying questions and hopefully schedule a follow up call.
You may be thinking of ISRs (Inside Sales Representatives) which are effectively SDRs who are authorized (and trained) to close very small deals, as compared to the AEs.
This actually requires a different set of skills, as AEs are often speaking to people in a “board room,” literally or figuratively, and sales cycles are long, meaning the contracts have to be huge to make it worth it (plus good AEs are expensive).
ISR sales can’t be long, as volume matters more than absolute price for inside sales, since that absolute price is orders of magnitude lower than an enterprise sale. As a result, the amount of time spent on each candidate customer has to be an order of magnitude lower as well, so qualifying a customer out of the top of the funnel is more important than almost anything else. The biggest waste of time is spending hours or weeks with a customer who was never going to buy in the first place, and novice sales people make that mistake all the time.
So yeah, I’m not sure what distinction you were trying to make between “telesales” and “telemarketing,” but that distinction really doesn’t exist.
Aside: literally every single startup hires bad sales people early on. Every single one. I have never seen one that doesn’t. It is, in my estimation, impossible to know what to look for in the right sales person until you’ve made a bunch of sales, which is why it’s so important for founders to make the first bunch of sales. But founders are a wholly different breed from sales people, and reading sales people is exceptionally hard.
For ISRs and SDRs, the solution is easy: hire them, train them, see if they perform, and fire them if they don’t and reward them if they do. Because SDRs and ISRs are so cheap, relatively speaking, as it’s an entry-level role, it’s a fairly low risk as long as you’re actually willing to put in the effort to train them and cut your losses when they’re not working out.
AEs are harder because their base is generally much higher, but they should come with a prepped “Rolodex”, ready to close deals quickly. If you don’t have a pipeline, solve that problem first.
Sorry for the rant, but seemed important.
Source: I’m a serial founder, have run sales teams, some successful and others not. I’m an engineer who happens to be good at sales, but finding good sales people is still a dark art.
OK seems like things changed a bit. Back in the day AE was someone who would work in lower level, less aggressive sales (fewer deals, bigger size) doing a mix of business dev and customer support - or it would be companies trying to add "manager" to the job title back when word manager carried some weight. Been talking from my own experience from basically 15-18 years ago from London and Europe.
As a person with SUV and big family in Paris, I suggest we do the same with obese people and public transport - now that my kids will need to use it more frequently while paying more for sq ft.
The vote did not concern resident parking places - even if you have an SUV you can still park as usual in _your_ area. Of course, if you drive to other parts of the town where you are not a resident (i.e. drive to a different arrondissement) then you count as a visitor. Its not unlogical - within Paris public transport should be used notably by those who live there - driving less than 5 miles inside the city makes little sense with some excceptions.
I'd agree that families have the best reason for larger vehicles given how public transport can be difficult for buggies ect.
An interesting intersection of gov trying to encourage families could be used here to offer a tax-relief on people that carpool (which'd by default therefore include families)?
A good public transport system is not difficult for families and even easier. Berlin has a pretty good public transport. We had a car when we first moved here (we're a family) but we never had the need to use it other than 1-2 occasions in a year because public transport + biking is easier, faster and more comfortable.
At the end we got rid of our car and not planning to buy another one. For those occasions that happens 1-2 times a year, we just use a car sharing app. It's also a lot cheaper than maintaining a car.
Sadly, Paris is not that. It's a great public transport system without families, but not for anyone with young children or with mobility problems. I can make do, but only if I have my 18 mos. old in the stroller OR my 3 year old walking, but not both. (It's a bit easier for my wife, because people will stop and help her up and down the stairs with the stroller.)
Buses do tend to be a bit easier if you're travelling outside of peak hours. Otherwise, you might have to let a bus or two pass you before one comes with enough space for the stroller.
Things are supposed to be a lot better with the Grand Paris Express, although that won't help much intramuros.
To be honest we're moving out of France. I don't see much future in this country if you have a family unless you go to somewhere like Auvergne where there's less jobs, mostly farming and these guys are getting decimated and cities run down. Owning a dog here starts to be higher virtue than having a child. French are moreover delusional about the role their country plays in the international scene and lot of other things. I give it 10-20 years max.
Was one of the first 500k users on Quora and loved it. Had a chance to get education and knowledge from top VCs and entrepreneurs directly. Even showed up on some meetups in London. Even was a published author with Inc, business Insider etc who were grabbing content from Quora.
It went downhill as it got gamified and you saw the rise of powerusers. I remember there was a guy who'd answer a question within 2 minutes of it being posted. Mostly based on first page Google results and he was the #1 poweruser.
And people assigned him an authority based on the fact that to up that point most quality users were also important in real life. But this dude seems like he was just a Quora addict with no outside credentials.
These guys quickly gathered what kind of answer gets you the most upvotes and so Quora became a pretty ugly biased place. There were still small micro topics with high quality.
Then couple of VCs/Entrepreneurs started using it for content marketing. And after that you've only had marketing interns from companies doing content post there. Add to it lack of monetization.
I've had millions of reads and answers, it was a good source of credibility I would think but I deleted my entire profile some year ago with all my some very in-depth answers.
I owe a lot to Quora though, it was a goldmine in the early days. It got me on the track of learning to code and advanced my education. also writing answers itself makes you research and double check and lookup sources. If anyone from Quora reads it thank you.
Edit: oh yeah, the person mentioned in the article was one of those early powerusers that made people like me leave the site. How funny. Seems like it worked out for her though. I just hope the same thing won't happen to substack.
Just dug up my old invite code to find this is pretty bad. Basically an app for the small obscure minority who left Twitter in protest including a bunch of ex users you'd only know from memes. Curious to see what this evolves into.
One of the most impactful things I've read was in the interview by Donald Knuth, shared here on HN some time ago:
"A person’s success in life is determined by having a high minimum, not a high maximum. If you can do something really well but there are other things at which you’re failing, the latter will hold you back. But if almost everything you do is up there, then you’ve got a good life."
Obviously he's an unpopular guy nowadays, but I often think about Louis CK's version of this:
I'm paraphrasing, but he essentially said he didn't try to make his best performances better, he tried to make his worst performances better.
That idea has been hugely impactful for me -- it's resulted in far less anxiety and self-flagellation in the pursuit of excellence, while still probably resulting in about the same overall improvement.
It's better to set one's own criteria for happiness. Can the criteria change? Sure! But, constantly trying to live up to someone else's standards is an easy way to make one unhappy.
Its not said, that it is about the standards of someone else. In the best case the high minimum comes intrinsic, if not why not get inspired by other's standards? I like this quote very much, thanks.
It's the core of what the article is espousing. Greatness is not achieved by a point-wise maximum, but by consistently strong delivery. Said another way, you're "only as strong as the weakest link."
GP is right and I'm not sure how'd that work for France... The US had more than 50% the GDP per capita France has and the US has 5x the population.
That's kinda the whole point: the US is still the world's 1st power (a place France lost after losing the Waterloo battle, basically) and nobody has as much spying power as the US do (China probably come close).
A country with 1/10th the GDP of another country cannot be spying "just as much".
P.S: and let's not forget that France is exactly nowhere when it comes to tech, with the biggest players like Dassault and Thales being irrelevant tiny players compared to the american behemots. In the top 100 companies by market cap in the world the four french ones are... Hermes, Dior, LVMH, etc. I don't think these exactly help spying.
P.P.S: I can see I'm downvoted by french "cocorico" readers ; )
Correlating espionage to GDP/economy is probably the most uneducated take on the matter.
Smaller countries tend to have massively outsided foreign espionage apparatus - see Japanese industrial espionage in the 1980’s, the French playing silly buggers globally, the Chinese basically boosting their entire economy off the back of intelligence collection, etc.
I mean you seem to be simply reducing spying to the GPD, when it varies very much with the policies of a country. Israel is 27th by GDP but is a world leader in espionage, and especially in surveillance tools. Similarly France is good enough at spying that it got offered to join the 5 eyes (it did not work out because France asked the mutual non-spying clause to be applied, which the US refused).
So while it is probable that the US has a bigger spying industry, it's also hasty to dismiss another player by saying "lol 10% of GDP"
> Hermes, Dior, LVMH, etc. I don't think these exactly help spying
Well France carried spying activities in Syria through Lafarge. Sometimes all you need is a foothold into the good places (Syria, or, for L'Oréal, rich circles)
And US has military bases in EU which is super convenient for listening stations and spy centers. Back in the Cold War the US held even a heavier hand in EU.
