Confessions of a Telemarketing Show-Off
I wanted to show off.It was my first telesales job, and it was 1986.
I was young, foolish and out to impress girls. What was I thinking?! I had been working for a couple of weeks for a kitchen company as a part time telesales person, and it was going well. I was fairly ok at a job I had stumbled into out of financial necessity. I had to make about 20 calls an hour. So back to the room; there were roughly 20 of us crammed into a tiny space, wire everywhere, and a page 4017 from the local telephone directory faced up at me, and at the time I believed this was a great opportunity!I knew my script, of course I did, I’d read it four thousand times a night. I casually turned my script over, nonchalantly, almost as Bogart would have done, had there been a telemarketing scene in Casablanca. Debbie on the right of me was sure to be impressed, and Kerry on my left have been about to ask me out on a date. Unfortunately, no one was impressed. My next call went along the usual scripted lines, and then, to my horror, the victim of my call said “Is this a recording?”I replied in a level of exasperation of which Frankie Howard would have been proud.“Of course it’s not a recording, ooh err, no Missus, titter ye not!!!” The call ended, and although I made light of it, and laughed slightly too loudly, I felt somehow quite stupid. What had gone wrong? Why had my failsafe method failed me? The truth was she had asked me if I was a robot, a machine, and she was right to ask. I had become a machine, an automated process. In my hurry to recite, I had left out the humanity. I then decided that although I wasn’t allowed to change the script, I could still make each call unique. So from then on, I never made the same call twice, a policy I’ve adapted when eating out. I was always polite, always interested in the person I was calling and I was always successful where others were not. I held real conversations, and no one ever asked me that awful question again. So what lessons did I learn? - Always try and have a real conversation
- There are better ways to impress girls.
Happy calling.  (0)
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