3 things I learned from the boiler room??

If you’ve never worked at a high volume outbound call center, it’s like a masters in sales, psychology, AND time management…

And it’s all rolled up into a pressurized powder keg with a short fuse.

Oh and there’s 100 other anxiety riddled “unemployables” jockeying for position and recognition.

And we all develop an immediate addiction to banging a gong for some reason?

Anyway it’s a great place to develop a strong coke habit.

(fortunately I skipped that last part)??

But it’s also a good place to learn critical lessons about business FAST.

Here are 3 that I picked up from my time in what some call the ‘boiler room’.??

Boiler room lesson #1: Eat what you kill??

Most of us entrepreneurs understand this idea at the surface level. But it goes way deeper than you might think.

In the call center, you’re lucky if you get a 500 dollar monthly base. Many of them are 100% commission only.

That’s not even enough to cover basic utility bills these days (cell phone, internet, electric, water, etc).

No one owes you anything and there’s 100 other guys who are laser focused on feeding their own families. If you don’t figure out how to get results you will starve.

The reason I say this goes way deeper is because “eat what you kill” is really about personal accountability.

If you’re a cave man out on the prairie and you can’t trap the gazelle…

You’re goin’ hungry.

And so is your family.

None of them care about how there aren’t many gazelles around anymore or how they don’t take the bait like they used to.

You gotta eat.

If you’re not getting the results you want it’s on you to figure that out. Your life depends on it.??

Boiler room lesson #2: Wear one hat??

The call center I was at had several departments. All of them very specific. All of them compensated on KPI’s that were closely related to their contributions.

For example:

Dialers called curated leads (typically 120-150 per day) and read a pre-written script to convert cold prospects into sales on the first touch point.

Lead gen scoured various sources to compile a list of leads for the dialers to keep their calling queue full.

Delivery handled onboarding and fulfillment of the service once it was closed.

Retention did the heavy lifting of keeping people from canceling the service when they were pissed or just no longer interested.

And management developed and tweaked the process to make sure everyone was operating at full potential.

Now if you look at that list you might be thinking “Hell I do all of those things!”

And if that’s the case you’re not alone.

But it’s costing you potentially millions of dollars.

The average floor sales rep closed 1 sale per day (some did 5 or more).

It was a recurring revenue product that cost about 300 per month.

So every day we were generating a new 30k per month in recurring revenue.

Every month we were adding 600k+ per month in recurring revenue.

No way that would be possible if the sales guys had to do lead gen, retention, and management.

So if you’re doing all those things stop!??♂?

Boiler room lesson #3: There are no limits??

Probably the most important lesson I learned was the fact that there is no actual limit on anything.

Only the one you place on yourself.

I came from a humble family. No one really earned much money. No one made too many waves.

This call center was the first place where I saw legit everyday average Joes pulling down multiple 6-figures just by sitting down and doing work.

One guy was making more than 300k per year and that just amazed me at the time.

The thing that amazed me more than how much he made was how little he had to do for it.

This dude would make 15 dials and close 5! Lol

His hourly rate had to be like a thousand dollars.

We sell ourselves stories that we decide to believe about what’s possible all the time.

I’ve been at this stuff for more than a decade now and I STILL catch myself bowing to some self-limiting belief I forgot to clean out of the closet back in the day.

It’s tough!

But if someone can sit down with a list of phone numbers and crank out a quarter million dollars in income…

You can do anything you damn well please.

Don’t let your pre-existing idea of what’s possible cloud your judgment. Go get what you want.??