Quick tips on becoming a good salesperson

Believe in yourself: Be confident. Make sure you think you are a damn good salesperson. No, screw that. Make sure you simply KNOW you are a damn good salesperson. Make sure that thought is stuck in your head so well it makes you almost arrogantly confident. A wise teacher once told me: "A sale is born in the head of the salesperson. It grows and grows until the salesperson can materialise that sale in the real world.

Believe in your product: Take a pen and a list of paper. Write down every single good thing about the product/service you are offering. Always keep that list close to you. When in doubt, look at that list. If you can't make yourself believe your product is damn good, you are bound to have trouble convincing others that it is.

Think of "YES things", not of "NO things": Only think of "YES things" during a sales negotiation. Think of all the good things that will happen to your customer WHEN (not if) he takes up your great offer. When you find yourself thinking "what will be this client's excuse for not taking up my offer", it's time to go out, walk around the city some, sit down in the park, close your eyes and have a cigarette if you are into that. Clear your mind. No go back and show the world you are a TRUE WINNER.

Set clear goals: When you wake up and go to work, don't think "Today, I will do my best". That's apologising to yourself in advance. Set a goal for the day, a goal that is high but one you can archive. Work towards that goal and reward yourself when you reach it: go to the movies, get some nice food or do something else that really pleases you. Set goals for the current week and current month. Set long term goals. The higher the goal is, the bigger reward you can justify for yourself.

Don't oversell: When negotiating a sale, don't spend an excessive amount of time praising your product or service. If you do, the customer is likely to think that "There must be SOME downside to all this if he's trying so hard. If this product was actually good, he'd probably already ask me where I want it delivered". When proposing a deal/sale to the customer, timing is vital. Is the customer does not look or sound interested in your product, just plain ask him why not. If you cannot convince your customer in a reasonably short amount of time, wish him a good day, forget his existence and make your next call. Your time is money.

Presenting Apinaraivo / Monkey Rage

It is only logical seeing as my previous post has been an explanation to why I am still creating custom content for an old game (Quake), that this post is about my latest actually finished project: a single player level for Quake dual-titled Apinaraivo / Monkey Rage.

This project took me about 6 months to do: creating the world geometry took about 5 months with the final month spent on tweaking lighting, gameplay, doing some quick fixes here and there and testing, testing, testing. I initially started doing the map in WorldCraft, an old but easy to use level design tool, but about 1 month into it I was persuaded by some fellow designers to switch to GTKRadiant which proved to be a much superior editor.

If you have ever played any custom content for Quake, you are likely to recognize some of the textures I've used here, they are "IKBase" by Fingers and "Speedbase" by Speedy. To my knowledge, I am the first person to successfully combine them in one map, creating a rather unique look. The map contains 6445 brushes (brushes are what you can call "building blocks" of a map) so it's nearly pushing the technical limitations set by the Quake engine.

If you have Quake installed and would like to try out this map, it's 2.5 MB zipped and can be downloaded [right here]. If you've never played a custom Quake map before, detailed installation instructions can be found in araivo.txt, which is inside the archive file. Comments and feedback are appreciated.

Why I make Quake maps

One of my long-standing hobbies is level design, basically I enjoy creating game environments for myself and other people to play in. Since I have been doing level design on and off for about 7 years (since the age of 15), I am quite familiar with different game technologies and tools utilized in the process. However, I tend to stick to older games like Quake and Unreal Tournament when it comes to creating and playing custom game content and I am not alone.

Many people unfamiliar with level design (and unfortunately quite a bunch of hobbyist level designers as well) seem quite shocked by the fact that someone could possibly be interested in working with a game from 1996 and they try to "convert" us, old-school designers to use newer games using arguments that vary from "Quake is old and ugly" to "Nobody will ever see your work". Hereby, I am trying to explain some of the reasons why me and quite a bunch of other people are "stuck in the past".

Quake is fun: it is a great game. It has fast-paced and brutal gameplay not seen in newer games (Painkiller comes close in this department, but it has other serious issues). It runs on a wide range of hardware and operating systems, you can play it on a P200 running Windows 95, an iBook running OS X or even the PSP (not to mention the more obscure hardware systems). You can drop into a deathmatch game for a 10 minute FFA match and you have instant satisfaction or you can play a large single player MOD like Nehahra that takes several hours to beat. OKAY, I admit that gameplay preferences are a matter of taste, but I think I've made my point clear: WE LOVE THIS GAME.

Mature technology: the software used to make levels for older games like Quake has matured a lot and it's now possible to do things most people wouldn't be able to imagine doing back in 2000, let alone 1996. These days the editor utilities are way more full-featured and easy to use. In 1996 Quake was a 320x200 game without a hardware accelerated renderer and most maps were in the 150-200 polygon/scene range. Today you can play it at 1600x1200, in full OpenGL glory with custom map projects pushing 1500 polygons/scene in some areas with 24bit textures and whatnot.

Easy to get into: If you want to make a Quake map, I can assure you that it's not very hard to make one. Pretty much anyone can grasp the concept of brushes and entities. All aspects of the game are well documented and the developer community is experienced and very helpful.

Working on a map alone: one of the problems with newer games (think Doom 3, Half-Life 2 and the like) is that in order to make a decent custom map, the designer has to be a level designer, texture artist, modeller, programmer jack-of-all-trades. Basically, unless you are multi-talented you are going to need lots of help from other people. With Quake you can make great stuff with just the level designer skillset (although programming experience could come handy if you are working on a project of big scale) and focus on the gameplay.

Cult following: Quake is far from dead, every half-decent map release gets at least several hundred downloads provided you notify the news sites of it's release and sparks discussions on message boards and IRC.

So you want to get into telemarketing?

So you just dropped out of school, your parents are kicking you out and you need to find a job that pays rent, bills and food. Okay, things might not be that bad, maybe you just need some additional income to save some money for that new TV/car/whatever. These days, many people when faced with the problem of unemployment turn to telemarketing and for a good reason: assuming you have some patience and are willing to learn, pretty much anyone can do it.

The real problem is that telemarketing is truly a jungle out there: there are lots of absolutely horrible companies to work at, some truly nice and well-paying companies and a lot of those that fall somewhere in-between. Here are some of my suggestions on DO's and DON'Ts of getting into telemarketing. This is pretty basic stuff, but I guess it could help some people.

Let me preface this by saying that I am in no way, shape or form advocating telemarketing that consists of calling up completely random people and trying to sell them stuff they are unlikely to want. It is a waste of their time (because they are not interested) and your time (because you are not likely to make much sales and income). However, it is very possible that you might find a telemarketing job that lets you sell great products and/or services in a nice enviroment and make some nice money.

First of all, you need to find a few companies that are actually selling products you can "believe in", if you honestly think that the product you are offering is crap, you won't be getting lot of sales no matter how hard you try. Selling magazine subscriptions is a nice way of getting in, I am pretty sure there are a couple of magazines you enjoy reading and are familiar with. Figure out which companies are marketing the magazines you enjoy reading (call them and ask if you have to) and apply for a job. If you find out that a big publisher has their own telemarketing sales division, try them first as they are generally amongst the best-paid places to work at in the market.

Arrange yourself a couple of interviews and take a really good look around the places you are applying to work at, pay attention to all the small details. How big is the place? How well-dressed are the employees? When talking to your prospective employer, don't be afraid to ask lots of questions. Some good questions to ask are:

How do they obtain numbers of people they call? This is IMPORTANT! Stay the hell away from companies that just go through the phonebook number by number. If they get lists of "old customers" from magazine publishers, mobile phone carriers (depending on the product you will be selling), you are good.

How is the salary calculated (pure commission, hourly wages + commission)? If you have absolutely no previous experience, I recommend a job with hourly wages + commission. However as you get better at your job, you might eventually realise that you could be getting a (much) better salary at a company with a salary based on pure commission. What is the average "turnrate" of employees at the company? How flexible are the work hours?

So you got the job? GOOD (if you can't even get a try-out period at a telemarketing job, you have bigger problems). One of the first things you should do when starting at the new job is making friends with people at work, fast. Zero communication with coworkers can make any good place to work at a living hell, fortunately the folks who end up in a telemarketing job tend to be the social kind, so this shouldn't really be a problem.

Final Advice: Don't give up too easily. You might only get 2-3 sales per day for a few couple of weeks, but with practice you WILL get better, MUCH better. Listen to the calls made by good salespeople at your company (ask the boss who they are), you will learn a lot. Happy telemarketing!

A short introduction

Hello folks, my name is Dan Naumov and I am a 21 year-old russian guy living in Tampere, Finland. For the past 6 or so months I have been employed as a salesman at a company doing direct marketing (do not confuse with what is called telemarketing in the US). Outside my job, which I actually do like, my interests include game and level design for computer games (think Quake), clothing, fashion and make-up as well as computer and network security.

A recent photo of me, summer-style: