EPISODE 35

The following Wednesday morning, I got a phone call from Bosco.  He was laughing his ass off. 

“What the hell did you do, Michael?  There are 26 bookings here!”

“Told you,” I said, just like a little kid.  I had killed those two days, averaging just shy of one and a half bookings per hour.  I had allowed myself two very generous lunch hours while I was at it, so my hourly average was actually a bit higher than the report revealed, but I wasn’t going to bring that up.  I’d also found plenty of time to make a few calls to friends to set up a party for the weekend, get in touch with my father, and to make daily runs to the Post Office and to the bank – all on Bosco’s dime.  If Leah ever found out, she’d kill me for sure – but the numbers didn’t lie. 

Bosco figured that half of all appointments never even show, so out of the 26 I had booked only 13 would make it.  Out of that group, half would buy.  I had just handed him no fewer than 6 new clients, each of whom would bring him at least $2000 a year over the next 3 years.  That was 36 grand at a minimum and there was no way my Lord and Master could be unhappy with that.  For the time being, it looked like I had written my own ticket. 

If you assume that 100 men actually responded to one of the late night infomercials that Bosco ran during the course of a week, there was one important variable that influenced the relative success or failure of that effort and that was how quickly each new prospect was contacted.  In a perfect world, I would have spoken with all of these guys within 24 hours of the time that they had called in.  But the mere fact that I had someone’s phone number didn’t mean all that much.  Roughly 10-15% of all of the calls we got in response to those ads came from friends or relatives of the person I would then try to call.  Of that group, the overwhelming majority were jokes.  No, nothing says funny quite like setting up your pal for an unsolicited phone call from a telemarketer who wants to ask pointed questions about his balding pate.  But even more daunting was the fact that the remaining prospects that had been outed by their BFFs were often quite embarrassed when I called them.

“So, tell me Steve – how long have you been losing your hair?”

“Who says I’m going bald?  Do I know you?”

“No, Steve.  But you did call our toll free number last night, looking for help with your hair loss.”

“No I didn’t.  Now, who the fuck are you???”

Those were the chattier calls of that nature.

When I had made calls for Bosco during the evening hours, I was usually only able to have anything resembling a meaningful conversation with 20% of the prospects I tried to reach. The rest were a complete waste.  So, my final pool was quite small and it eventually became even smaller.  Out of the group who would engage with me, only half would end up booking an appointment.  Of those who would book, only half would show up and out of that tiny portion of the whole group of names and numbers that we had collected, 2% out of the entire pool that we began with would become customers.  This meant that if we were to grow the business by 2 new clients a month, we had to generate a total of 1200 new leads every year!  It got even worse though when you took into account how many individual calls were required to have those  “productive” conversations that made up the pool that was our target market.  I would have to make an average of 80-100 calls a day to make that happen. 

By now you may have divined that there was mathematically no way I could ever have made 26 appointments in 18 hours, as I had during the first 2 days that Bosco allowed me to make calls during the daytime.  In spite of this obvious truth, I was not bullshitting anyone with my report of those 26 appointments.  The formula that so soundly contradicted my miraculous claim of success had held true for years and it wasn’t until I started chasing people between 8AM and 5PM that some of the basic assumptions of telemarketing in this business got upended.  I’m not claiming that I was some kind of a genius.  Far from it.  But I did recognize that harassing people from the traditional dinner hour through the first hour of prime time television viewing was probably not the most efficient way of spending one’s time.  Hell, I remember making calls on April 27^th of that year, the night of Richard Nixon’s funeral, which was literally the night after I’d gone slinking off to the 7 Barrels Brewery to quench myself with fresh ale and self-pity.  To my amazement, almost every person I called had been glued to CNN’s live coverage of the disgraced former president being laid to rest and several of the people I spoke with that evening were quite offended by my call, even more so than they might have been under normal circumstances.

“What the hell’s the matter with you?” 

“We’re watching the president’s funeral!” 

“Go away!”

I had hoped to offer some level of comic relief, but to have said so might have been in poor taste, even by my standards.  At around 8 o’clock I had decided to head out for a few beers.  I couldn’t face the possibility that the 7 Barrels might have the funeral on the tube there, so I had driven home and made short work out of 4 bottles of homebrew while listening to a bootleg recording of a Grateful Dead concert instead.  If the world was going to mourn Tricky Dick, I was going to be the lone celebrant of the counter culture he had so deeply despised.  Let them all go bald!

The next episode of SlipNot will be published on May 5th.

If you'd like to read SlipNot in its entirety, GO HERE.

EPISODE 34

Things did get better.  I spent some time with Bosco discussing the way I had been working the leads.  It turned out that he was incredibly generous and he seemed to actually enjoy teaching me how to listen better and to probe the prospects.  His feeling was that if I could be cured of the lousy habits I had of over-presenting and interrupting clients before they’d had the chance to reveal what motivated them, I might someday make him a few dollars.  The managers at the studios he owned were equally obliging.  They knew that my success meant their success.  It was a first for me.  I was working in an organization that recognized that being mutually supportive wasn’t just a nice thing to do.  It was a smart thing too.  Everyone was so damned pleased with the steady improvement of business that I knew it was time for me to do what I do best: blurt out that everything we were doing was fucked.

I did so in my own very diplomatic way.  I came into work one afternoon, about an hour before my shift was to begin.  I sat down in the chair across from Bosco’s desk and gave him a smile.

“Oh Jesus!” he exclaimed as he laughed.  “What are you gonna do now?  Quit on me?”

“Nope.  I’m going to show you how to make some real money.”  I kept my eyes on his and waited for him to react.  He shrugged and pointed his hand at me.

“Okay,” I began.  “I finally get how I’m supposed to get these leads to talk to me and I’ve gotten pretty good at booking them.  Hell, more than half of them show up for their appointments and that’s a frigging miracle as far as I’m concerned.  But the problem is that we’re still not making the kind of new sales that we could.  It’s not like I’m not qualifying them and it’s also not that the studios aren’t doing a great job of closing them either.

“What we need to do, Bosco is to flood the studios with qualified prospects and we can’t do that if we’re only averaging 30-40 bookings a week.  We need to make it 60 a week, maybe 70.”

Bosco wasn’t smiling anymore.  I had his attention, but he held a skeptical expression on his face.  He liked the premise, but he doubted whether I really knew what the hell I was talking about.  Still he didn’t say a word, even though I remained silent.  It was funny, both of us were waiting for the other to go first and neither of us was in any hurry.  In retrospect, I realize now that while I was doing this to sell Bosco, he was doing the same to me, to see if I’d get rattled.  Did I actually have anything, or was I just woofing it?  Finally, a long 15 or so seconds, I started back up.

“We don’t need to hire any new telemarketers either, which should at least make you a little bit happy.  The bad news is that you are going to have to shell out more money.”

“I figured as much,” Bosco said sourly.  “How much?  And why?”

“You’re going to have to come up with enough money to put me on full-time.”

Bosco looked up at the ceiling and laughed.  “Oh man, you have big balls, Michael!  So you want more hours?  Sure!  But what are you planning on doing, calling people up on Friday and Saturday nights?  They won’t even be there.  It’s a waste of time and money.  Believe me, I know.”

I waited for Bosco to finish and then I fixed my eyes on his again and very evenly, I said, “I realize that.  I wouldn’t waste my time then either.  What I want you to do is to turn me loose during the daytime.”

Bosco’s success and indeed the success of the entire industry had been based on an important assumption about their target market.  You approached these guys by advertising on late, late night TV.  “The moles”, Bosco used to call them.  They were up late with nothing to do and so we hooked them with a 30-minute infomercial that promised them the hair of an Adonis and the social life of every mean popular kid they’d known in high school.  The ads were slick, showing stunning male models at the swimming pool or at the beach with gorgeous women, living it up.  The dream was sex and the moles were awake at 1 in the morning, watching our models live it.  You want that life for yourself?  You better have some hair on your head otherwise none of these hotties are going to give you a second of their time.  If you think that was cruel, you would be right.  There was nothing subtle going on here.  The promise of the good life with hair was juxtaposed by the threat of watching TV alone with your bald self.  But then, our prospects were alone with nothing to keep them company except for the tube and that was usually what got them to pick up the phone in the middle of the night and call into the toll free number that constantly scrolled at the bottom of the screen.  Some of them likely dialed in just to see if they’d get a real person on the end of the line.  That’s how lonely they could get.  But the reality of it all was that we were looking for the guys who couldn’t take it anymore.  They were willing to do anything to change the fact that their socials lives had been reduced to watching infomercials on late night television.  They’d wake up the next morning after only 6 hours of sleep, go to work and crawl back home in time for dinner and another night alone.  The whole strategy of getting to the ones who called in was predicated on the assumption that they were dying to hear back from the people who had promised to give them hair and a real life before they found themselves watching another infomercial after midnight.

This was why Bosco practically barked at me.

“Michael!  No one’s home during the day!  They’re at work!”

“Not the ones who work second and third shift, Bosco.  We can’t reach those guys at night, ever.”

Bosco smiled as he thought about that.  “Good point,” he replied.

“What time do you think you can get to these guys?” he asked.

“Well, the third shift usually gets out at 7AM, so they would be walking through the front door at about 8 o’clock…”

“Assuming they go straight home,” Bosco interrupted.

“Not a hell of a lot of bars to hit at that hour,” I offered.  “But let’s assume that our guy joins a couple other folks from his company for breakfast at a diner before heading back.  He’s still home by 10, at the latest.  A third shift worker just doesn’t have a lot of after work social opportunities.  We have to get to him before noon though, because after then, he’ll be asleep.

“Now the second shift is more like 3PM to 11PM and that’s the guy we can start to chase at around 1 or 2.  You see what I mean?”

“Sure,” Bosco agreed.  “So, you want to come in from 9 in the morning until 2 and then take off until your regular shift here starts at 5, right?”

“Only if you make me.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?

“Well Bosco, if I do this right, I see this being a straight up 8 to 5 operation.  No nighttime calls at all.”

“Michael, I think I’m getting to know you pretty well.  You’re a good salesman, but there’s no way you can reach the prospects who work at a regular job at home when they’re at work.”

“Exactly,” I replied.  “That’s why I’m going to call them at work between 2 and 5 every day.”

“We don’t have their work numbers!” Bosco protested.  “We have to get them at home!”

“So, I’ll ask whoever answers the phone at home what our prospect’s work number is.”

“Like I said, you have huge balls!” Bosco laughed.  “What makes you think anyone will do that?”

“Let me come in next Monday and Tuesday morning and make calls from 8 until 5.  If I can’t book at least 16 appointments during those two days, then I’ll never bring it up again.  What the hell you got lose, Bosco?”

“16?  You’re talking about me paying you for 18 hours.”

“Fine.  Make it 18 appointments then.  Do we have a deal?”

The next episode of SlipNot will be published on April 28th.

If you'd like to read SlipNot in its entirety, GO HERE.

EPISODE 33

In the beginning though, things were more complicated. When I first started working for Bosco, my shift began at 5PM and finished 4 hours later, Sunday through Thursday.  It was normal to book one appointment per hour, which was exactly the rate that Bosco was looking for.  He figured that if his salespeople could get between 8-10 appointments set per day, they would average 2-3 new sales each week. Bosco had me “teamed” with another telemarketer, a women named Angie.  I don’t know what the hell she would say to those guys on the phone each night, but she booked more appointments than I did, by a good 4:1 margin.  My desk and telephone were right next to the office laser printer, so that every time either of us booked an appointment, a report was generated and printed right there and then so that when Bosco came in the next morning, all he had to do was scoop the reports from the previous evening up out of the tray to see how we’d done.  That damned printer powered up and printed out Angie’s appointment reports so fast and so often that I got pretty damned discouraged during the first couple of weeks I worked there.

One night, after I’d been working there for about two weeks, I lost it.  I’d been dialing through a particularly fruitless batch of leads and had only booked one appointment in the previous 3 hours.  Angie had 7 and as I put the phone down after being told by a very nice woman that her husband worked third shift and was still sleeping, I powered down my desktop computer and packed it in.  Angie leaned towards me in her chair, her hand over the telephone mouthpiece.

“Where are you going?” she whispered.

I smiled as I put my jacket on and replied, “Out to get drunk.  Want me to bring you a cocktail ‘to go’?”

Angie scowled and returned to her call.  I walked outside and headed to my car.  It was April, but that sure as hell didn’t mean it was spring-like outside.  Vermont doesn’t experience the second quarter of the year quite like anywhere else in the country.  In fact, when you consider that between the sub-zero lows in January and the 90+ degree highs in July, the state probably sees the greatest flux in temperature of anyplace in the hemisphere.  Where else are you going to live through a 100-130 degree swing in a six-month stretch?  It was foggy outside.  It was also cold.  I happen to like cold weather, which was why I still lived in Vermont, even though a lot of the people I’d gone to high school and to the University of Vermont with had left the state to build their careers and to raise their families.  I was 37 years old, single, living in a rented cabin at the end of dirt road, and working part-time as a telemarketer for the state’s reigning hair replacement mogul.  About all I had going for me at that moment was that my car was paid for and that it had a new battery.  Oh yeah, and the fact that I didn’t mind the cold weather.  The battery did its job and I drove out of the parking lot and headed south toward Interstate 89.  I drove over the bridge that spans the Connecticut River and into New Hampshire, taking the first exit, eventually stopping in front of the 7 Barrel Brewery in West Lebanon.  

The Brewery had opened only a few days before, but already it had attracted a very big following.  It was the brainchild of Vermont master brewer Greg Noonan, the author of several great books on beer and ale brewing and the owner of the Vermont Pub and Brewery in Burlington.  Noonan was a pioneer.  He had opened the first brewpub in Vermont in 1988 and the 7 Barrel Brewery was his first bid to expand, just 6 years later.  The community in the Upper Connecticut Valley took to it too.  When I got there, the place was jammed.  Even so, I managed to squeeze into a seat at the bar and ordered a porter.  It was dark, malty and delicious.  I had been brewing my own beer for about a year by then and so I had begun to fancy myself as a bit of a connoisseur, or “beer snob” as some of my friends had begun to derisively refer to me.  I took a long, thoughtful swallow of the porter.

In back of the bar, there were 7 large metal vats, each labeled with a hand written sign that displayed the type of ale or beer that was being fermented in it.  Or so it seemed.  The real business took place outside the back dining area, where the brew master made the mash, added the hops and eventually pitched the yeast.  The sweet malt smell permeated everything and it was one of the reasons why I’d fallen in love with the place the first time I’d driven by.  The steam rose off the top of the brewing pot and you could see that from the road.  But it was the scent of the malt that really drew me in.  You could smell that from the road as well.  It reminded me of what my cabin smelled like when I brewed at home. 

Brewing at home is actually pretty easy, so long as you keep your kitchen and brewing tools clean.  You do the same things that a commercial brewer does, except on a far more manageable scale.  The first step is to create a mash by cooking up the cracked grains of malted barley in a pot of water.  You don’t actually boil it, as that would kill off the enzymes you’re trying to build.  It’s how those enzymes interact with the yeast that you add later that dictates so much of how your brew will turn out.  After you strain out the grains, you add the hops and whatever flavoring grains you need.  For a dark ale, like a porter or a stout, you might add black patent malt, or chocolate malt, as well as the very sweet flavored crystal malt. I remember that there was a little girl who lived across the road from my cabin who used to wander by from time to time, to see if I was brewing.  I would give her a handful of the crystal malt, which she would eat, much the same way a baseball player chews on sunflower seeds.  She absolutely loved the flavor!  Her father would come by to pick her up when she did this and the two adults would share the fruits of my labors, while the little girl snatched another handful or two of the malt.  Cooking the brew was the most fun then.  Once the stuff had a chance to ferment, basically all you had to do was bottle it and wait for it to age a bit. Don’t forget, the bi-product, or waste produced by a healthy yeast population is alcohol.  The more successful those little yeasty beasties are in reproducing, the more alcohol they make.  This is to their detriment as the alcohol is toxic to them.  Eventually, most of the yeast dies and so you separate it from the rest of the beer with a siphon, give the brew a small boost of sugar to reactivate whatever living yeast is left so that it can help to carbonate your brew and into the bottles it all goes.

But at the 7 Barrels Brewery, I could enjoy all the smells of the process without having to deal with the mess.  The place was loud, which I liked.  I find that the quiet of any empty tavern is oppressive.  People tend to whisper and in doing so they actually attract more attention to themselves.  In a crowded room, you can’t hear a thing anyone is saying because they’re all talking at once.  This also means that no one will notice you, if you’ve just come in to grab a few beers and to contemplate why you have turned out to be such a failure at your new job.  I took another drink from my glass and let my mind wander back to the mess I’d left at work.  I knew how to sell.  At least I was pretty sure I did.  Were the leads Bosco gave me just crap, or was I making some major error in how I was working them?  Or had I perhaps taken a sales job in an industry where I had no business being?

The next episode of SlipNot will be published on April 21st.

If you'd like to read SlipNot in its entirety, GO HERE.

EPISODE 32

When I first met Bosco in 1994, it was to answer a classified ad that he’d placed, looking for a salesman.  His office was located in White River Junction, not far from where I lived in Hartford, Vermont, which was a plus as it meant that I wouldn’t have a long commute to get to work.  I had some experience selling fly fishing equipment, canoes, kayaks and other kinds of outdoor gear, so I figured that I could handle anything he threw at me.  He spelled out that my job was to be making phone calls in the evening to men who had responded to a late-night infomercial about hair loss.  To say that it all seemed a little silly didn’t do the situation justice, but I needed a job and the commission rate that Bosco outlined looked very promising.  The trick to the conversation I was to have with each new prospect was to ask seemingly logical, almost clinical questions about his hair loss experience.  Of course, those questions were actually meant to trigger a hugely emotional response on the part of the prospect, allowing me the opening I would need to get him to agree to visit one of the studios that Bosco owned.  These conversations would go something like this:

“How long have you been losing your hair?” I would always begin.

“I don’t know,” was the standard response as the prospect tried to think back to the first time he had looked into a mirror and realized that he was beginning to go bald.  He usually came up with an answer, but only after reflecting on that first, painful moment.

“Where is the hair loss occurring?” I would continue

This question forced the prospect to detail where he felt the balding pattern was most noticeable.  Again, I had posed a question that someone like a doctor might have asked him, in an apparent effort to help me come up with a remedy.  This was complete nonsense though as this entire conversation took place over the telephone.  There was no way I could diagnose or suggest any kind of care this way, but if the prospect was feeling the pain enough, he would continue the conversation in the hope of getting help.  Once my prospect had explained where he was losing his hair, my job was to motivate him to tell me what his fantasy was, how having his hair back would change his life.

“What was it you were hoping I could do for you?” I would ask, and before he could answer, I would add: “Were you hoping I could slow down the rate of your hair loss, or did you want all of your hair back?”

Oh, good lord!  What a question!  A susceptible prospect would be reeling with conflicting thoughts by now.  Was I promising to re-grow his hair?  Was that even possible?  Was this all a con?  What if it’s not a con?  Could he really get back a full head of hair???  But most vitally, the prospect was now beginning to fantasize about what his life would be like, if only he had hair on top of his head.  This was the moment that I had been waiting for and I would lean in for the kill.

“I’m wondering, what was it that got you to call in after you saw our ad on television?”

And that was the whole battle, right there.  This was when you heard what the guy really wanted in life.  More often than not, it was sex (big surprise).  I heard some wonderful responses to this question, although my favorite was from a guy who had overheard two women at the company where he worked talking about him.  One said she thought he was kind of cute, but that he was clearly too old for her.  It killed him that he was shut out of any possibility of being with her and he blamed his male pattern baldness for it.  So it was that if I could get the prospect to reveal to me why he held out any hope that anyone could help him, then I could ask him whether he wanted help from me.  Once that bond had been made, I owned him.

There was, of course, the odd exception.

One night about 9 months after I started working for Bosco, I got a guy on the phone and after getting the appropriate responses to the setup questions, I asked him why he’d called in.

“That’s a good question!” he’d replied cheerfully.  “You know, I’ve been losing my hair for a long time, 10 years or more, but I never figured there was anything I could do about it.  What the hell, my wife thinks I look okay and if she’s happy, so am I.  But you know, I was out in the yard over the weekend, giving my dog a flea bath and I notice that he’s got a lot of fur on him, even those he’s older than hell.  Jesus, he’s 14 for cryin’ out loud.  That’s what…98 years old in people years!  So I’m looking at him and I’m looking at the flea shampoo I’m using on him, so I begin to think about it.”

“Think about what?” I asked, immediately wishing that I had kept my mouth shut.

“The shampoo!  I mean, the dog’s got lots of fur.  I use this stuff on him every month or two and so I figured – what the hell!”

Oh god, I thought to myself.  Please don’t tell me…

“So I started using his shampoo and I think it’s working!”

Of course.

The next episode of SlipNot will be published on April 14th.

If you'd like to read SlipNot in its entirety, GO HERE.