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.

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