[mc id=”397″ type=”audio”]Bossy Telemarketer[/mc]
I’ve got nothing against telemarketers. Heck, many blue moons ago I was one myself…and a piss poor one at that. During my college days, I did a brief telemarketing gig for New York Life. I worked with leads of small businesses and pitched them on cheaper health insurance plans.
The lists I was given were 2-4 years old, so it wasn’t uncomon to be told that the person I was trying to reach was dead. Usually this was a relative of the deceased.
Talk about a downer.
After several weeks of this sort of misery, I finally made my first sale and anxiously awaited my commission check. The only problem (speaking of piss) was my prospect tested off the chart for opiates. No policy underwritten. No commission.
So nowadays, I empathize with cold callers. In fact, I sometimes enjoy engaging them and finding out what they’re made of. But because the vast portion of my day is blocked out, the telemarketers have to “tell it to the chip.”
Recently, I bought something online called “Launch Tree.” More megabytes of crap on a hard drive already loaded with it. I’m still a sucker for such things and I wouldn’t have even recalled purchasing this but for the dozen or so messages from a hard-sell telemarketing team.
Big, bossy voices spouting lines like: “Lawrence, do this, now” and “Lawrence, you need to call my office today before 5:00 pm.”
Doesn’t bother me. I need all the merriment I can get since giving up drinking and the Lauch Tree has paid in spades.
Actually, the impetus for this post came after I dialed a freind of mine last week and he pegged me as a Launch Tree trimmer. My friend used to make a very lucrative living as a royalty copywriter until making an even more lucrative one doing high level licensing deals. So it was a kick to hear him recap his Lauch Tree interchange.
Launchtree: “Do you wanna keep playin’ around online…or are you ready to make some real money?”
Friend: “No, I’m just a tire kicker, thank you very much!”
(Silence.)
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