Yellow Pages Don’t Pay So Well

I ended my job at Valley Yellow Pages a week ago. TJIC wrote to me about it and I responded…

>Did the yellow pages not end up paying that much?

Not so well. One of the clinchers happened a couple weeks ago… There was an office-wide meeting. The boss, Jesse had a bunch of numbers on the board. The first ones looked like this:
171k 91k 84k 70k 54k 53k 52k 50k… He had 13 numbers on the board in all, the last one was 40k. He told us, “I won’t say who each person is, but these are the earnings of each person in the office. Look how well you can do! I want you to do like this [pointing near the 91k] and not like this [pointing to the clump around 45k]. As he kept speaking about how much money we could make, I thought about the numbers…. 171k, That’s Tambri. She’s a Yellow Pages MACHINE. Her son had a broken arm a month ago and she told us how she was in the Emergency Room going over her Leads waiting for the bone to be set. 91k, that would be Jackie. No one knows how he gets so many contracts. No one. It’s actually a tiny bit suspicious. But hey, he’s doing well for himself.

And then there’s the rest of the pack… rather, I should say, the rest of the bell curve. You see, there are 30 salesmen in the office. First, Tambri and Jackie are the outliers. From a few seconds of mental calculations, it looked like the midpoint was about $38k. So the AVERAGE salesman in the office makes $38,000. The meeting wouldn’t have been quite so upbeat if the boss had shown the other side of the curve.

So to answer your question, no, Yellow Pages doesn’t pay that much.

2 Comments

  1. Brian says:

    Yow – sales can be a great job if you’ve the right kind of mindset.

    I don’t have it, but I recognize it. At Sprint Paranet we had this sales guy / manager. He could walk into any business – any – and come out again 30 minutes later with solid leads that would lead to work for the rest of us.

    I loved him for it – but couldn’t emulate it in a million years.

  2. Lee says:

    Try reading “How to Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie. And I recently put the Zig Ziglar podcast in my lineup. It’s good stuff… not just for “Sales” but life.

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