How to annoy people on the phone
The phone rang the other day and the first sound that I was not the main centre of the callers attention was the general office drone in the background and the fact that the caller finished a conversation in progress before speaking to me.
“Hello, I am from XYZ^%£!”*&^, How are you today?” (I don’t know much about cold calling but I am guessing that the “How are you today” was a crude way to try and build empathy.
“OK”
“The purpose of this call today is to gather information about your business”
(Oh right, so you ring me out of the blue and you tell me what the purpose of the call is. Do you know the difference between pull marketing and push marketing?)
“Can I take the business name?”
“Umm well you just rang me – don’t you know?”
The caller then proceeded to requesting information, (much of it publicly accessible) which is a lot to be asking straight off the bat with no obvious benefit to me the recipient.
“Now the purpose of this call is to help you get unwanted sales and marketing calls”
“You mean like you ?”
“I’m sorry?”
“You mean unwanted calls like yours?”
“Pardon?”
“Well you ring me up out of the blue and start to sell to me”
“Oh I am not selling, I am promoting”
“There is a difference?”
“Well sorry I know you have a list of numbers to call but you are doing a good job of showing how to annoy people on the phone. Can you you remove me please?”
She hung up on me – result..
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Can I be Overall Organisational Concept please. Great post Jon :-)
how to write a customer focused letter
Agreed. I think often big corporations send letters either with the in
How to annoy people on the phone
It's tough being a telemarketer. Somehow I do have sympathy, maybe bec
Matthew Anderson
I've had a few of these – I think the company called themselves The Anti Marketing Group or something similar.. And I did much like you did, gotta feel sorry for telesales people as they must know it's beyond a joke what they do.
Jonathan
Hi Matthew – Maybe I need to give them a moment or two longer and find out ?
Maxxy
You don’t have to feel sorry for all of us telesales people as some of us do valuable, professional work and we are not sitting around for sympathy votes to come our way!
All this talk about push and pull marketing. There is no right or wrong, it’s about having a mix and best fit according to individual businesses.
A live client today has had two leads in 2 hours, if he sat around with his optimised site waiting for the same level of return for people to come to him he would be in very deep trouble.
Just as there are good and bad telemarketers there are good and bad businesses out there. I spoke with one incredibly snotty woman yesterday who immediately took offense to reference to their business being in a particular industry hence the reason for the cold call, and she didn’t actually know what the business was registered as with Companies House, or what the disclosed turnover was, or who the directors are. Amazing how some senior managers don’t know this basic information yet a telemarketer can have this information to hand.
Was the purpose of this call to get rid of unwanted sales and marketing calls or to get more of them? … (typo or have I misread it?)
Max
Jonathan
typo ? Don’ worry the place is littered with them.
I think the call was a “database clean up call” – maybe subcontracted from one of the bigger fish.
As the headteacher of our kids school once said to me
“If you aren’t pulling knives out of your back, you aren’t doing your job properly”
Yes I agree, all business types have good and bad apples – same as anything.
Maxine Hayter
Love it.
Yes, there are good and bad in all industries; but when I have registered with TPS and have a “no name, no info” policy, I am always amazed at the attitude from the caller when we mention both of these.
Previous conversations include:
“We are registered with TPS” reply “What’s that?”
“Do you know who you want to speak to, only we have a “no name, no info” policy” reply “How stupid is that?”
“Do you know who you want to speak to?” reply “Mr…. Bespoke?” (the first word in our business title)
I could go on…… All I will say is that everyone has a job to do, so we aim never to be rude to anyone. However, to tie up my business lines when we are all fighting for business is frustrating, especially when they don’t know anything about my business before they call. I wouldn’t dream of going through the Phone Book calling people and asking if they want blinds; and I’m guessing that my conversion rate from visitor to customer is far higher than any cold caller-based business.
Jonathan
Hello Maxine & sorry its taken us a couple of days to reply.
You raise some interesting points
Not knowing what TPS is – hmm pretty sure the poor folk who actually do the ringing are just lowly paid disposible temps – so why should they know or care.
Never being rude to anyone – absolutely essential these days
Tying up the line – THIS is a little nugget that most people miss. We WANT the phone to ring and iut obviously won’t if someone is on it…
Thanks
Maxxy
There are some very different views and these can usually be split by those who are 1) on the TPS and 2) Those that are not.
People on TPS have made that decision and I believe this should be respected and I certainly would not waste any time or effort calling people on it just to have abuse hurled at me.
Much better to call people who are not on TPS, who are receptive to cold calls in the main, with a decent marketing message. You would probably be surprised at the return on investment from proper campaigns but obviously they vary enormously from business to business.
I’ve said this time and time again but it is usually the smaller companies not aware of TPS but doing cold calling in house, or the larger companies that are aware but don’t care, that usually breach TPS rules. The typical freelance telemarketer or telemarketing agency is very well aware and isn’t daft enough to break these rules.
I guess every industry has it’s difficulties. The state of the telemarketing profession is pretty poor at the moment. I cannot recruit decent people for love nor money at the moment yet clients are crying out for work.
Hopefully some of the good telemarketing people out there can just continue to lead the way with professionalism and keep their fingers crossed
Beatrice
It’s tough being a telemarketer. Somehow I do have sympathy, maybe because I did cold-calling years ago. How can you build rapport? You try to call when people are at home, which is usually dinner time. Not the best time to call for the recipient, who wants to eat his dinner in peace. This also applies to any other time, it’s never right.
Yet, I am totally against cold-calls. If a company wants to gain my business, it certainly doesn’t get it by calling me out of the blue, unwanted, and not agreed to. It’s an invasion of privacy, simple as that.