Cold Calls

Due to a vacation of the regular person, I've been covering the reception desk at work a lot the last few days. I'm doing it right now, in fact. This entails pretty much what you would expect but in the contemporary world, where most people use email and any calls will often be made directly and not to a generic main company number, the types of calls we receive at reception skew heavily toward the cold calls. Cold calls, if you don't know, are calls wherein the caller doesn't have an actual contact at the company and instead is making the call in an attempt to acquire a contact which will then presumably lead to some sale. Cold callers are always trying to sell something. They are also often outsourced employees, meaning often they are foreigners,(1) and almost always that they are making the calls from some large room full of people with headsets all making similar calls.(2)
I have been covering reception for short stretches of each day for me entire tenure at my job and have gotten good at dealing with these callers to the point that it's like an autopilot switch. The basic is that no one gets through to the desired party. If the caller has a name, the best they will get is that person's voicemail. If no name (the most common start to a cold call is like this: "I need to speak to the person in charge of........."), the best they will get is an opportunity to leave a message with me, which consists of me reading something sports-related online while they dictate their callback number(3) to me slowly and sometimes twice so I can presumably transcribe it correctly.(4)
Anyway, the reason I'm writing about this now is that if you don't just sit back and mindlessly accept the practice for what it is, and instead think about it in a larger way, it becomes rather interesting.
1. What is the business model for the companies that make these calls?(5) Do they really think that this kind of old-school contact-gathering still works in 2009? How much time are they really willing to invest? Many of these are basic questions pertaining to marketers, but I guess I can't even begin to figure out how it could be profitable to market yourself this way.(6) The more you think about this, the more you can realize that there must be something, which leads me to:
2. Why would a business being solicited by a cold caller ever play into the sale?(7) It's extremely easy to pick out these cold calls and almost as easy to get rid of them. Still, there must be enough instances where recipients of these calls take the bait and the seller ends up with a client or at least just a one-time sale. As someone who has dealt with their menace for years now, I can still say that I am dumbfounded daily by the futility of the whole enterprise. Further, I often pity the poor souls who are making the calls. Usually, they are just following a script and doing their jobs. I try to let these people down easy or to be somewhat respectable or professional. I can't imagine what it would be like to fish around for leads constantly like that. It's about the worst thing I can imagine having to do from a personal-dignity standpoint.


1. Yes, the stereotype is true: lots of cold calls are made from Asia and of course especially India. Often, the caller can't really speak the language very well and/or the call quality will be so bad I have to hang up. This can't be good for the seller's image. What I find particularly amusing is when the callers have been taught only enough English words and phrasing to get through a basic cold call. I mean, they have certain word cues that allow them to understand but if you answer a question differently than they expect, they will be totally lost. This happens more often than you might expect actually. And I can sorta respect that aspect of this whole enterprise: why waste time teaching people more than they need to know. Efficiency. Of the perhaps 10% of the calls where the caller will go blank because the party will go off-script, those will surely not outweigh the cost and effort to further educate the workforce.
2. A recent wrinkle of the last year or two is that more and more of these calls are now automated, so you can simply hang up on them.
3. Many times the cold callers won't have a callback number. I mean, literally they are calling from a dialing center that doesn't have the function activated to receive calls. This happens with the outsourced callers primarily, and I can have fun with it because the clueless callers will usually have a tough time explaining why it is that I can't just call them back when it's convenient for me.
4. I think I actually write down the person's info maybe 5% of the time. Perhaps 1% of those times is the info actually ever used. So one out of every two thousand times a cold caller is patient enough to actually leave a message with me will the message actually get to its recipient. No, this represents me doing a good job and not a bad one.
5. I'm talking not about the outsourced calling groups but the sellers themselves.
6. I share similar disbelief for anyone who still pays money to advertise in the actual physical yellow pages. If you do this, you are too far behind the curve to be saved.
7. Pause now for your regularly-scheduled arrogance: I know I'm not the typical receptionist who would be fielding these calls, and that the people who do can't analyze this stuff as sufficiently and just generally are more prone to doing dumb things. But surely simple receptionist stupidity can't explain this?