Compass
Compass CommunicationsOfficial New Zealand telecommunications site.
Career · Auckland · c. 2007
Compass Communications: the job I left because the sales culture made me sick.
My first move to Auckland was personal. I met a young woman in online chat rooms and, after months of talking, fell madly in love with her. We eventually decided I would move north to be with her. I was not going to arrive with no income or plan, so before I moved I found work with Compass Communications ↗. I moved to Auckland with the job already secured. It lasted only briefly, but it became important for two completely different reasons: it drew a hard line in the sand for me about how I wanted to sell, and it was where I met Jack from ALT TV.
References & historical context
External references are provided for chronology and context. They do not imply endorsement, employment verification or a commercial relationship beyond what the chapter itself describes.
The Compass product itself was good. The rates were competitive, the savings were easy to demonstrate, and I very quickly realised I could sell it honestly on the strength of the actual offer.
The product did not need lies.
What infuriated me was the sales culture I encountered. The office sales star was a young Indian guy who the two managers treated like some sort of king because of the numbers he was producing.
What I remember hearing on his calls was very specific. He would present himself to customers as being from Telecom and tell them they had been selected as winners for cheaper rates. The call would then be used to move them away from Telecom and onto Compass.
I regarded that as a lie. Not clever positioning. Not aggressive sales language. A lie.
What made it worse was that it was completely unnecessary. Compass had a proposition that was good enough to sell on the real savings alone.
You did not need to lie, and I was proving that. I was matching his sales numbers while selling the product honestly, using the actual rates, the real savings and the real offer. Management could see that an honest approach was producing comparable results, yet they showed no interest in changing the tactics they were rewarding.
That made me sick to my stomach. The whole idea of people getting excited about sales numbers generated by deceiving customers felt twisted to me. The product was good. The honest pitch worked. I could not understand why they would want to keep doing it that way.
A line I kept
Performance never required me to abandon the customer.
That became an important distinction in the way I built sales systems later. I was intensely commercial and I wanted high numbers, but I wanted the pitch to survive contact with reality. If the product was good enough, the process should make the value clearer, not manufacture value that was not there.
This Compass experience also matters because parts of what happened later in my telecommunications career make more sense with this chapter intact. I am documenting those later parts separately as I get to them.
Compass also led directly to ALT TV.
During that short stint I met Jack, a presenter at ALT TV. He asked me to produce the station’s late Friday- and Saturday-night shows. I took them on and rebranded the late-night block as ALT After Dark.
That media connection outlasted the Compass job. I left Compass, moved into HRV, and the ALT TV work continued alongside the new role.
Read the ALT TV / ALT After Dark story →
Leaving Compass is what pushed me towards HRV.
I started looking for something else because I did not want to remain in that environment. The opportunity I found next was HRV, and at first I nearly dismissed it because the product sounded painfully dull to me: home ventilation.
That turned out to be one of the more important misjudgements of my career.