Page 66 - James Caan - The Real Deal

The Real Deal

all. I was justifying in Brian’s mind why Reid Trevena was so
important.
‘So how many saving policies do you think you could sell in a
week?’
‘I don’t know, maybe ten?’
‘So what’s that? Two a day?’
We’re agreeing between us how achievable that sounded.
‘What if I told you our commission was more like £100?’
Now he would be really impressed, and I’d get out a pad and
pen and do some sums with him.
‘So if you sell ten a week . . . you make about a grand a week
. . . you could make four grand a month.’
‘Wow.’
‘What are you earning at the moment?’
‘£13k.’
‘Which is about . . . £1100 a month.’
For the rest of the interview, I was pretty much guaranteed
Brian’s attention. Watching Tom had enabled me to steer the
conversation so that candidates believed in what was achievable. I
had made them see that saving was desirable and therefore easy to
sell, and I had made the number of sales they would need to make
a week seem plausible. If I had just said to them ‘Come here and
earn a fortune,’ the chances are that they wouldn’t have believed
me, and, crucially, they wouldn’t have believed that they could do
it, which is why Tom’s techniques were so good.
‘Obviously, you’ve not done financialsales before,Brian,soIthink
we should be conservative about your targets, because I don’t want
you to take a big risk that you might regret. So let’s just go back. Is
there anything about the concept of saving that you’re unclear about?’
‘No, I understand that.’
‘OK, so let’s halve your estimate, let’s say instead of two sales
a day, you only made one a day. Does that sound doable? Would
that scare you?’

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