Why Salespeople Want To Work With Stable.Work

I love working with Stable.Work.

They reached out to me this summer wondering if I was open to a 'sales opportunity' and my first reaction was, "Is it commission only?"

I've been getting a lot of those offers since The Year of the Plague unfurled its diseased octopus tentacles from Ground Zero, Wuhan.

No, they said, we pay an hourly rate. Freelance, you set your hours, all work from home.

My more-jaded-than-the-Taj-Mahal soul snarked, "Yeah right," but my more rational side instructed my fingers to respond to the LinkedIn private message, "Okay, I'm ready to hear more."

What I heard sounded, well, interesting, as the Taj part of me snarked. But they were in fact paying hourly, and well, and they claimed they could keep me as busy as I liked so I figured okay, let's try them and see if they're, in the words of an old friend, 'all that and a bag of chips.'

I'm glad I listened. They are.

Working from home the way we always dreamed

Stable.Work is a freelance sales agency based out of Vancouver, British Columbia. They stick to North America - their freelance sales team is Canadian only, for now, but their clients are in both Canada & the U.S. You apply for 'gigs', and negotiate your pay, but this isn't like better-known work-from-home services like Upwork or Fiverr. The differences:

• You don't pay a fee to join Stable
• You don't pay to apply for the gigs
• You can negotiate your pay with your potential gig employer, but with a start point from which the only direction is up. There's no race to the bottom where you're working for a couple of bucks an hour. Stable.Work isn't for businesses looking to get things done by qualified sales professionals on the ultra-cheap, but it's a far more affordable alternative for smaller businesses, particularly startups, for whom a permanent sales team isn't part of the budget. It's a fair rate for professionals. It filters out Fiverr-budget clients.
• Because Stable sticks to North America, you're not competing for gigs with overseas competition willing to do the job for much, much less.
• The application process to become a Stable rep isn't particularly onerous nor time-consuming and you'll get a pretty fast response. No waiting four months for them to make a decision. They need sales pros. NOW.
• Applying for a gig isn't soul-destroying as it is with the Overseas Gang. You send gig clients a quick message telling them why you want to work with them and what your qualifications are. You might not get a response, but the competition isn't nearly as thick, and some companies perpetually seek sales help. I thought the ones that were 4-5 months old were dead gigs no one had cleared out yet, but no, WYSIWYG; if the ad is there, they need salespeople. Also, Stable will recommend you if they think you're well-suited for the client, and the clients trust their judgement. Stable is highly supportive of clients and sales pros. They do their level best to make everyone happy.
• Here's my favourite benefit: You don't have to chase clients for payment. Stable pays you online, like clockwork. Period. It's contract work, so you're responsible for your own taxes, and you don't need to charge GST/HST (Canadian sales tax). I put aside estimated income tax with every payment.

This is not my home office desk. I don't even have a cat. Or a second screen. Or that many phones. Creative Commons 2.0 Generic License photo by Emilian Robert Vicol on Wikimedia Commons.

The working conditions

• You set your own number of hours; you work entirely from home.
• All you need is am Internet-connected computer, a phone and a quiet area to work. Headphones are strongly encouraged but not required.
• You can work part time or full time; when they told me they had more work than they could handle I figured they were exaggerating. They weren't.
• Here's my favourite working condition: I get treated as a truly valuable associate. My opinion is solicited and heard; if there's a problem, on my end or the client's or Stable's, it's handled with emotional intelligence. No office politics or high drama!
• There's room to be creative. Stable provides you with all the scripts you need for your gig clients but you can rewrite them as you wish.
• I love working for different clients, for short periods of time. Some of them last just a few weeks; others go on for months. I'm always learning something new including how to be nimble and get au courant with a new product or service with which I may not have a lot of personal experience. My first gig was introducing a food ingredient I didn't even know existed to an industry I hadn't worked much with. They kept me on until we'd literally exhausted the North American market.
• Stable's clients slant heavily toward high technology/SAAS. So it helps to have a technical background, sales or otherwise.

The downside (fairly minor)

• It's contract work, so not everyone will like no paid holidays, vacations, or health benefits. I look at it this way: For better or for worse, that's the trend. One potential upside: Learning to live with uncertainty may inure us to the attraction of taking yet another soul-destroying job just because they'll have us and we want the benefits.
• Don't mistake this for a temp job where everyone agrees they're trying you for 90 days and then have the option to hire you themselves.
• You're largely working on 'BC time' as I think of it. I'm in Toronto; the bulk of Stable's clients are in the two western time zones; mostly Canadian, a few in the U.S. So my full-time hours are 9-6 rather than 8-5. For me, it's a small price to pay, especially in the Year of the Plague when I don't have the social life I had in days of yore...like, 2019.
• There are a few other rough edges but nothing that isn't being directly addressed. Stable Support regularly solicits any sort of feedback, positive or negative, to make working for Stable and working with Stable (gig clients) easier, better, more pleasurable, and more revenue-enhancing for all concerned.

Stable is always hiring, and always looking for new clients. Currently, they can only take Canadian sales pros but they plan eventually to hire from the U.S. If you're a Canadian sales rep in need of a second job or even a first job, I encourage you to reach out via the website and apply; this is one of the best jobs I've ever had!

• Pricing
• How to become a sales rep
• How to become a client
• Meet the sales team (Leaderboard)