Free Sample
The Complete Guide to Becoming A Telemarketer
The real numbers, daily grind, and honest career math you need to decide if telemarketing is your path - or your dead end.
by Alumigogo Books
Chapter 1: What Does a Telemarketer Actually Do?
Chapter 1: What Does a Telemarketer Actually Do?
Let's start by clearing the air. When you picture a telemarketer, you're probably imagining someone slumped in a gray cubicle, reading a script from a card, and getting hung up on fifty times an hour. That image is not entirely wrong. But it's also not entirely complete. If you're seriously considering this career, you need to know what the job actually is on a Tuesday morning at 10 AM, not just what it looks like from the outside.
At its core, telemarketing is the business of making sales calls to people who did not ask you to call them. That's the definition. It's outbound calling, which means you are the one picking up the phone, not the one receiving the calls. You are selling something - a product, a service, a donation, a subscription - to a stranger who has not shown any interest in buying it. The entire job revolves around that one uncomfortable fact. You are interrupting someone's day, and your job is to make that interruption worth their time and your company's money.
The actual work has three main components: making calls, managing your leads, and keeping records. Let's take each one.
The Calls. A telemarketer spends roughly 70% to 80% of their shift on the phone. On a normal eight-hour day, that's between five and six hours of actual talk time. The rest is spent recovering between calls, updating your