Tips for telemarketers

[Larry Harp]

(1)The three little words that work are: "Hold On, Please..."



Saying this, while putting down your phone and walking off (instead of hanging-up immediately) would make each telemarketing call so much more time-consuming that boiler room sales would grind to a halt.



Then when you eventually hear the phone company's "beep-beep-beep" tone, you know it's time to go back and hang up your handset, which has efficiently completed its task.



These three little words will help eliminate telephone soliciting.



(2) Do you ever get those annoying phone calls with no one on the other end?



This is a telemarketing technique where a machine makes phone calls and records the time of day when a person answers the phone. This technique is used to determine the best time of day for a "real" sales person to call back and get someone at home.



What you can do after answering, if you notice there is no one there, is to immediately start hitting your # button on the phone, 6 or 7 times, as quickly as possible. This confuses the machine that dialed the call and it kicks your number out of their system. Gosh, what a shame not to have your name in their system any longer !!!



(3) Junk Mail Help:



When you get "ads" enclosed with your phone or utility bill, return these "ads" with your payment. Let the sending companies throw their own junk mail away.



When you get those "pre-approved" letters in the mail for everything from credit cards to 2nd mortgages and similar type junk, do not throw away the return envelope. Most of these come with postage-paid return envelopes, right? It costs them more than the regular 39 cents postage "IF" and when they receive them back. It costs them nothing if you throw them away! The postage was around 50 cents before the last increase and it is according to the weight. In that case, why not get rid of some of your other junk mail and put it in these cool little, postage-paid return envelopes.



One of Andy Rooney's (60 minutes) ideas...



Send an ad for your local chimney cleaner to American Express. Send a pizza coupon to Citibank. If you didn't get anything else that day, then just send them their blank application back! If you want to remain anonymous, just make sure your name isn't on anything you send them.



You can even send the envelope back empty if you want to just to keep them guessing! It still costs them 39 cents.



The banks and credit card companies are currently getting a lot of their own junk back in the mail, but folks, we need to OVERWHELM them. Let's let them know what it's like to get lots of junk mail, and best of all they're paying for it...Twice!



Let's help keep our postal service busy since they are saying that e-mail is cutting into their business profits, and that's why they need to increase postage costs again. You get the idea !







If enough people follow these tips, it will work.

 

[Aaron Scott2]

Good tips Harpo, I'm going on offense.

 

[Jeff R.]

I'm in!

 

[TrepMan]

I hate to say it, from an IBM manager, but we went "Low tech" last year, and dumped Voice Mail and went to a digital answering machine and now screen calls with caller ID. I don't answer the phone unless its a caller ID we know.



I do LOVE the idea of telling them to hang one and go away!!

 

[William H. (Bill) Barham]

Love it!! I'm sitting here waiting for the phone to ring.

 

[TritonGlenn]

I got a TeleZapper last year, and my telemarketer calls almost completely disappeared after a few days. After a month, we changed out phone cord out, as it got pinched, and forgot to re-hook up the TeleZapper. Guess what? Still extremely few telemarketers! I guess the thing worked so well to start with, it removed our phone number from their system, and they never tried again.



Before the TeleZapper, I would try to sell them something before they got the chance to sell me something. The phone calls went like this:

Me: Hello

Them: Hello Mr. Des - o - morow! (the minute they mis-pronounced it, I knew it was a telemarketer)

Me: Hey! How are you today? (Very excited)

Them: Fine sir. I'm calling you (cut them off at this point)

Me: Who am I speaking to today?

Them: Well, uh, this is _________ from (cut them off again)

Me: I'm so glad you called me _________. I've got this great new deal on sunglasses that I wanted to tell you about. We have a new .............

They normally either keep trying to cut in, but I ramble on about EVERY pair in our catalog, or they hang up.

I actually sold a pair to a lady when I was in Pensacola! She was a local telemarketer, and was in need of a pair of quality sunglasses! Now how's that for salesmanship?!!!:lol:

All the best,

Glenn

 

[Rusty C.]

Those are great tips except the "hold on" tip. Many telemarketers are paid a percentage of their pay based upon how long they can keep you on the phone. Why? The longer they have you on the phone, the longer you hear their sales pitch, the greater the chance is that you will buy the product or service they are selling. Basically, there is a timer put on every call. At the end of the day, week, or however their pay intervals are set, part of their pay is based upon how long each phone call was for. Of course they get paid the most when you sign up for the product or service they are selling.



So, some telemarketers won't care if you set the phone down. The seconds are piling up. When they have reached the max, they hang up. They are most likely to call you back. They know they can score big if you set the phone down.



I have three recommendations. The first way is the legal process way. Simply cut them off and ask them their name, their supervisor's name and the company they are representing. Tell them to take you off their call list or you will file legal action. If they call you back, you have every legal right to sue the chit out of them. You will win. I read in the local paper how several housewifes made some major $$$ by just sitting at home waiting for solicitation phone calls.



The second way is the fun way. Yep, have fun with it. There is always a point where they have to ask for the sale. When they do, continue to say, "can you repeat that." This will frustrate the caller and they usually will hang up. I like to start singing in the phone. Mary had a little lamb is one of my favorites. That song will be stuck in their heads for the next day. They will go around either to themselves, out loud, or both singing that song no matter how hard they try not to. I also like trying to "pick up" whoever is calling. I might ask them what they are wearing, tell them they sound sexy, ask them for their phone number, etc. Then I might tell them "I have been really wanting to meet someone special. I just got out of prison for killing my ex-wife (or whoever) and was wanting to start my life over.":lol:



My favorite and works every time. When they call and ask for whoever, just say in a voice that sounds like you are about to cry, "I'm sorry; _______ was killed in a car wreck last week." This makes them feel like chit and they will make sure they remove that name from their list. They don't won't to waste their time calling someone who is dead, much less feel like chit when they hear a story like that.

 

[Sue DeLelys]

Even better, sign up for the national do not call registry.



http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/edcams/donotcall/index.html



It's free and you cannot be called for 5 years, with a few exceptions. If I remember right, you can be called for charitable donations and for surveys. In those cases, just say please put me on your do not call list. They then cannot call you for 1 year.



I have found these methods to be very effective. I understand that these people need to make a living too, but I don't want to be bothered and now I am not.

 

[Larry Harp]

Rusty, I hate to admit it but I did work as a telemarketer for a brief but very poverty stricken period of my life. We were told just the opposite of what you say. They wanted a volume of calls. They said that if someone started to argue or ask too many questions to just hang up and go to the next name on the list. We were only looking for the easy sale. I trained at a huge boiler room in Houston TX that 50 phones working from 8 am to midnight selling Hawaiian vacations for $399. We could start calling the east coast at 9 am and finish on the west coast at 10 pm. Here's the interesting part...everything was sold using credit cards, right? As I got to know the other sales people who work there I found out that I was the only...and I mean the only one who didn't have a prison record....so think about that the next time you give someone your credit card number over the phone. There was a lot of weird stuff going on too. That was without a doubt the strangest 2 weeks of my life. I only lasted a couple of months in that business.



The do not call list does help. Before I signed up on that they were wearing my phone out here. I would say the number of calls has dropped by 90%. However it's starting to creep back up. Here's the scam... They call and tell you it's a survey and they are not selling anything and then they start asking you questions about your buying habits or your home mortgage and they end by asking if you would like to speak to a consultant about lowering you intrest rates or something like that.



We're seriously considering turning off the home phone and going to straight cell phones. Nobody but telemarketer call us and the only reason I can think of to keep it is for the Tivo, which can be wirelessly connected to the computer for updates if I want.



Harpo