Weekend Engagement : Nicknames in the Sales Office

It was many years ago that I worked in Sales, TeleSales to be precise. I have some good memories of my time working there because of the people. The working hours were not so great though as we worked 12-8 pm. There was no home office then and I was just starting out in my career.

This was not so good for your social life but allowed you to sleep in and not rush in the mornings. There was also no weekend work which is always good. Later when I switched to part-time, it was a really good work/life balance because of the long weekends.

Now the afternoon's would drag out a little as from 12-5 pm, you couldn't really get hold of many people because they were at work. But it was a good time to grind anyway or hit up some warm leads you had nearly closed in the past weeks.

Psychologically it was just really important to get some points on the board before the evening grind started. This was because you needed to see some progress in your mind and also it made reaching your daily target much easier if you had managed to grab a few sales early doors.

In the office were a few characters who had all been given nicknames by our resident funny guy. He had been disciplined once after a customer had told him to "go take a run and jump. So he did and landed up outside" was found on a customer record.

There was always some banter about what we were selling and I got the nickname of one of our products "BBI". As I tried to portray myself as a closer, I would always casually say that I had just closed another BBI. Therefore my nickname stuck that I was known as BBI. Not even the full product name, but an abbreviation of it.

I was not alone, next up there was Scott the Robot. His nickname with Scott and Robot sort of rhymed too. He was a really slick guy who moved in a very precise and coordinated fashion. He was quite a good talker and could close reasonably well.

This translated also to his dating activities where his roboticness went down very well with the ladies. He was approaching 40 at the time and not everything was going so well. During the time I had gotten to know him, he had decided to try a new drug called viagra that was released on the market and he vouched that it had worked wonders. The robot had been given a new lease of life.

The nicknames continued, next up was Mark Park. Now Mark was a DJ who was only doing this part-time gig to supplement his DJ'ing activities. The nickname was particularly lackluster as it only rhymed with his first name.

The running gag with Mark (to his disdain) was that our funny guy was prank-calling him every now and then and just not saying anything before hanging up. For the laugh, he would sometimes call him with a withheld number while Mark was at work with us.

This calling and not speaking drove Mark insane. Over the proceeding weeks and months, as the gag went on, his anger was reaching a fever pitch and it could have been a life-threatening situation to tell him even that you knew about him being prank called.

After Mark was Stu. Otherwise known as The Machine. The reason? He was a selling machine and didn't take no for an answer. It was easier for the customer to just say yes to get off the phone with him. Regardless of your answer, the engineers would be coming round to connect you up if you liked it or not!

Stu would often be equipped with a new joke whenever you met him. "Have you heard this one?" he would always say. They were often the type of jokes that made you laugh (usually rude ones). He was a well-built guy and played football each weekend. He loved to get the hard tackles in and often spoke of the many injuries and tackles he had been involved.

While we would all be calling warm leads, Stu would be cold calling people and closing them such was his sales ability. There was no way to compete with him.

Thanks for reading.

Credits:
Title image was created in Canva using my own photo.