I was with the Marcus Evans group for a little over a year in their "Middle East" office in Malaysia, and although it was exciting at first as I had never done b2b sales before, it eventually got quite tiresome and really began to wear on me.
The standard MO is to bypass all gatekeepers by telling them that you are calling from "ME Commissioning" (if you're doing a plant commissioning event) or "ME Capital Markets" (if you are doing a banking/finance event), to make them think that you are calling from a potential client. Sometimes they just lie to the PA of the CEO/MD to get their boss' mobile number by telling them they are an existing client from exxonmobil or pwc or wherever, and that you they in an airport traveling and have to get ahold of their boss for some urgent project related matter; they say that their BlackBerry is corrupted or that they misplaced the MD/CEO's business card, and that the matter is very urgent. Not all PA's are so stupid to by this crap, but many still are and if the delivery sounds very urgent and the salesperson achieves his objective of sounding like a bigshot, they will get your mobile number.
Once they cold call the MD/CEO after a couple of days, they promise them the world about the event they are working on, that there will be all of these c-level execs at their event, and that there will be no less than 50 other senior execs paying to attend the event as delegates. The salesperson then challenges the MD by telling them that if Marcus Evans were to put them in a room with all of these potential clients, that if they cannot get new business by sponsoring the conference, then there is something wrong with them and not ME Group. They will also cook up some BS "urgency story" to get the client to bite asap, as if they let the decision sit too long, then the prospect will more than likely do their research and find all of this negative things about the company on usacomplaints.com and other sites and not book.
Another strategy they use is to drop names like crazy, of all the senior people in the past their so-called "producers" begged to come and speak at their event, to make you believe that you are indeed getting good value and not question their business practices.
I did make my fair share of money, made more than my previous sales job that is for sure, but I got tired of their unreasonable sales targets and having to lie through my teeth about everything to prospects.in the end noone got hurt, because I was pitching fairly wealthy companies and not individuals for their life savings like in the movie boiler room, but essentially this business is a parasite to the corporate world.
I always found it funny that in all of their websites and offices, their slogan is "One of the world's leading business information companies". It's not like they are bloomberg or something, they are selling other people's ideas by getting them to come and speak at their events; moreover, as a leader in "business information", they don't even give their staff ready access to information by having this absurd 7 people to a computer rule. The only people who have their own pc are managers and the gm, which i think is ridiculous in this day and age.
I wouldn't say never work for this company, because you do get a fairly decent sales training, but don't let them brainwash you into thinking it is the best gig in town.
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