Page 71 - James Caan - The Real Deal

7 · The Job That Changed My Life

By 9.30 a.m. everybody would be on the phone, and if the team
leader noticed someone had started slouching in their chair
because they’d been knocked back five times in a row, he’d come
round, get them off their chair and make them stand up. If you
stand when you talk on the phone, your posture changes, you
become more animated, and your mood improves. If people were
getting a lot of rejection, they tended to bounce back better if they
stood up.
Everything was about keeping the motivation levels high, and
when people had been with us for a couple of months, the team
leaders would start to talk to them about Porsches and long-haul
holidays just to get them dreaming and thinking big. If you could
make a guy believe he could drive a Porsche, then he started
working harder to earn the money to pay for a Porsche. All the
techniques Reid Trevena used were designed to increase people’s
belief in themselves, and I realised that what I was witnessing was
a group of people talking their way to a fortune. Every day I
watched everything that went on, observing how this huge sales
machine enabled Len to drive an Aston Martin and Tom to have
a choice of Mercedes parked in his drive when he was only
thirty-five. I was like a sponge soaking it all up.
Everything the company was achieving was by dint of its
passion, its adrenalin, its corporate self-belief, and if you worked
there you couldn’t help but be inspired. The place was electric all
day, and I knew how rare that kind of atmosphere was because I’d
worked in places like Alfred Marks. Even though I wasn’t on the
sales team, my time at Reid Trevena changed my perception of
what I could achieve. Taking ordinary people and putting them
into an environment where they were made to feel they could do
things they had never previously thought of doing was simply
exhilarating.
You might think I’d have been sitting there wanting to join the
sales team so that I could earn as much as them, but it never

61