Life at durhamlane – Musings from a sales executive

At the time of writing, we are now in our third week at Deltic House, a fantastic new office space that has made headlines, along with the six-figure outsourced lead generation contract renewal with Rezatec we were delighted to have won last month.

My name is Jamie and I have spent the last 8 months working for durhamlane as a Sales Executive for the outsourced business development team.

To be brutally transparent, I applied for the role as a placeholder for a couple of months – a way to earn before finding a ‘real job’. Since then, as cheesy as it sounds, I’m near-addicted! I love the buzz and camaraderie of the company and how I’m able to be making a real difference with our clients, helping them grow.

The new office and a flurry of new clients and projects means durhamlane is now on a big recruitment drive, looking to hire up 25 new colleagues to join the outsourced business development and sales recruitment/executive search teams. It certainly feels like an exciting time for the company, and a great opportunity to join a company that is rapidly evolving and investing in its people.

My day-to-day job involves creating qualified sales opportunities for my clients, so they can spend more time closing, rather than generating meetings. Essentially it is a typical sales role, ‘typical’ however seems to be a word missing from the dictionaries of our Managing Partners – Lee and Richard who founded durhamlane on a mission to ‘raise the bar of the sales profession.’

It seems to me like they have deconstructed a typical sales role and rebuilt it with a focus on back-to-basics human interaction. Gone is the me-against-you mentality that a lot of salespeople seem to bring, and the majority of my work can be summed up in one of Richard’s renowned Sales Mantras – ‘be interested to be interesting’. If you are engaged and interested in what you talk about, you will naturally become engaging and interesting to speak to.

From the offset, creative thinking is encouraged and rewarded, with unconventionally effective methods being celebrated. For instance, email subjects, which often devolve into bland and banal product summaries or kitsch all-caps exclamations, now seem to be more of a playground, with creative headings not only being more rewarding to conceive but tend to reward with more opportunity.

This seems like a small aspect of the role to focus on, but this atmosphere of creativity and freedom flows through every part of the job, with different ideas and themes stemming from a diverse team.

At durhamlane, we carefully craft ‘call blueprints’ using our ‘Selling at a Higher Level’ methodology and ‘Magic 35’ qualification tools. Once you commit the basics to memory, improvisation on the phone is key, and once you let the facts and figures take a back seat you find yourself able to listen more attentively and uncover more and more information about your prospects as you go. This leads to a higher quality of opportunity than is typically found, and is why we do what we do.

I have spent some time thinking about why this job feels so different to what I thought it would and to what I imagine other sales roles may be like. The aforementioned creativity and empowerment make up a large part of it, as does coming to work alongside friends, but I think the atmosphere that we create is harder to pin down and has to be felt to be understood. If you’re anything like me then you’ll be hooked!

Development is something very valuable to me, and as a final point I should stress that development is important to durhamlane. The freedom and creativity I keep mentioning is not just present in our day-to-day work, you have freedom on where you want to go. Strengths are discovered and then nurtured, allowing you to grow in ways not possible in other companies. Hence why me – a Sales Executive, who took the role as a stop gap – is now writing an evangelical piece on why this is such a rewarding role!