Following on from yesterdays post about intelligent – and not so intelligent – conmen, here’s a post about the complete opposite group: Cold Callers.
Some of you might not know this, but many years ago, I was a cold caller.
Sorry.
I’d just moved to Australia, needed a job and – for minimum wage – I became one of those annoying bastards who calls up random people trying to flog them stuff … except in my case, I was calling random businesses and my ‘product’ was a low cost, long distance phone line from APP.
I think I managed to stick it out for about 6 weeks before getting a job back in adland – for another 6 weeks in a media department [talk about from the frying pan into the fire] – however looking back, what I found interesting was there was no ‘script’ to speak to, it was all down to how you chose to interact with the person on the other end of the phone.
It shames me to say that I was quite good at it – though the real reason has far more to do with it actually being a decent offer at a time where the whole concept was new, rather than my gift of the gab – however I did realise that one of the best ways to not get the phone slammed down on you after a torrent of verbal abuse was to not pretend you were their friend, but to say upfront you’re trying to sell them something and that you just would like 3 minutes of their time before they can tell you “to go to hell”.
[I used to literally say “you can tell me to go to hell” and it was amazingly – and weirdly – well recieved, which highlights how people love the idea of being able to give ‘abuse without consequence’]
Anyway, since that experience, I’ve been sort-of intrigued by the whole cold calling methodology – especially when I continue to get such crap calls from call centers despite reading how they all have ‘amazing and tested systems’ for success – so I’ve decided to take the plunge and enroll in a cold calling course so I can find out once and for all if it’s all bollocks [check out the worst David Brent video of possibly all time] or a skill only the true masters can pass on.
So from next month, I’m going to be learning from this man …
I have no idea what will happen … I have no idea what/if I’ll learn … I have no idea how I’ll be able to actually ‘test’ my [alleged] new found skills, but if you start getting random phone calls from me, you’ll now know why.
Here goes absolutely nothing!