I Was An Undercover Telemarketer

(Direct, November 1994) My supervisor took me aside my third night on the phones.

“Look, Ken said, shutting the door of his small, bare office. “You’ve noticed that some of our reps are a bit psycho around here? I mean you’ve seen that, right?”

Let’s see. That night, one woman suddenly burst into tears, the first of her two usual crying jags per shift. Next to her, another woman whispered into her headset, both hands moving, a street mime without an audience. Nearby was the guy who delivered his pitch standing up, smacking fist to palm, in what I’d call a “pep-rally” style.

And then there was me. I’d been counting the seconds between calls and fighting a new and alarming urge to twist my hair in knots.

I started laughing. Psycho reps? Now I was one of them.

For one week in September, I worked as a part-time telemarketer in a local division of a large national firm I’ll call Telefoners. I sold subscription magazines for charity, and sold them pretty well. In 23 hours, my computer had diligently dialed about 1,000 leads; I’d reached about 320 of them, sold to 41 and grossed about $1,100 for the company. For this I was paid $138 salary plus $82 commission. Not bad, I was told, for a beginner.

But it wasn’t money I was after. It was the chance to see how telemarketing works—from the inside. Consumer groups rant about it, legislators want to regulate it and even a lot of telemarketers seem self-loathing, judging from their average 28% annual turnover, according to industry statistics. Was it really so terrible? There was one way to tell…I went undercover.

All names and details have been changed. Otherwise, what follows is what I experienced on the job.

“Not bad,” I’m thinking. In a new office, shiny and bare, a man named Alan sits me down and says, “So, tell me about yourself.”

He’s learning across the desk, hands clasped, all ears. Nice contrast from Bernice, the aggressively perky manager at the other, smaller place I’d interviewed. I’d been turned down after it was determined, presciently, that I couldn’t “demonstrate commitment.”

Alan’s like a good football coach, revved up and genuine. He doesn’t ask much, and after he praises my reading of the script—“Customer Sales Discussion”—I’m in. Hours will be weekdays 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. “See you Monday,” he says. Fifteen minutes have passed.

Day 1–Monday

“Things have changed here,” says Kev, our young, peppy supervisor. “A year ago, you’d just walk in and they’d hand you a script. Today,” he says in a practiced, singsong way, “we give you a little history, show you how we put the script together, do some role-playing, okaay?”

Training night. A clearly bored woman and I sit at a small conference table while Kev pops in a video on our charity. The film is heavy on triumphant, beaming children. He follows up with earnest remarks and syllogistic sales logic: Everyone loves this charity, everyone needs magazines, so who wouldn’t want to buy magazines from us?

The best part, Kev confides, is that we only have to call past subscribers—“It’s not like it’s cold calls!” he chirps. To prove it, he marches through the script, then plays Mr. Jones, a prospect in various states of magazine desire.

Trudy, my training mate, has slumped boneless in her chair throughout. I try gamely to match Kev’s enthusiasm, mouthing such scripted gushers as, “We raised $250,000 with your support, isn’t that good news?”

In 90 minutes, the training is over. We’re phone-bound.

Feeling like a game-show contestant, I’m led to a cubicle by Lorna, a pleasant but somewhat tired woman with long nails and fussy hair. Around us are 25 reps huddled into padded cubicles, engrossed in computer screens. Nobody looks up.

Lorna logs me on in Group C, the training group. As soon as I press “send,” she warns, my first call will come over the line, dialed automatically by the computer.

Now I’m nervous, irrationally certain of doom. I double-check my script, the headset bleeping in my ear. I press “send.” A name rolls across the screen, followed by address, last magazine purchased and the charity. Lorna puts her monitor up to her ear. Someone says, “Hello?” “Mr. Anderson?” I inquire.

I’m lucky. Mr. Anderson is friendly, though he assures me he has no time to read—he just plops in front of the TV set at night. I ask if he’d enjoyed his past subscription to Popular Mechanics (“surefire tactic,” Kev said); he says he never read it. Lorna mimes at me, points to a list of magazine names. “Maybe you’d be interested in sports?” I blurt. “Sports Illustrated?” No dice. We hang up. Lorna, it turns out, was pointing to TV Guide. “He says he watches TV,” she explains. Oh.

More calls. I push through the script in a detached, panicky way, surprised that most people let me get through it before hanging up. My first sale is a cakewalk, too easy, a woman whose subscription to <em>McCall’s</em> just expired and wants to switch to <em>Ladies Home Journal.</em> I feel as if I’ve won a $5 Scratch ‘N’ Play. “You’re doing great!” Lorna enthuses in what I now recognize as Supervisor Gush. I’m left alone to handle the rest of the night’s calls.

Day 2—Tuesday

Today, Lorna sits at the front of the large, bland room, dictating names and numbers to Kev, who dutifully records them on a large write-on/wipe-off board. These are the reps’ conversion rates form last night. Conversion rate, I’m told, are the number of sales divided by local calls, minus answering machines and “not homes.”

They write a six next to my name, meaning my three sales added up to a 6% conversion. “Good work!” says Kev, even though the goal, penned next to my name, is 15. “Don’t worry about sales,” Lorna soothes. “In your first week, just get the presentation down.”

Minutes later, Kev sits Trudy and me down to assure us of Telefoners’ new kinder, gentler sales approach. “You know, until two months ago, it used to be that the customer had to hang up first. It was like, ‘So, I’m gonna sign you up for another year of Time, okaaay???” he laughs. “The problem was, people started hanging up as soon as they heard our name. So today we emphasize”—he pauses for importance—“customer service.” Which means wait until the customer has said no twice—then thank him or her politely and hang up.

Strangely, I find this reassuring, as if no one here will really care if I don’t talk people into buying. I make a conscious decision to go with the flow. Don’t sweat the sale. Just learn the lines, be nice.

It works. After listening a few minutes, I start to notice which reps are good. One man across the hall, for instance, drawls, “Oh, my goodness!”—all sugar—into his mike. Another woman with a cigarette rasp speaks unhurriedly, in a motherly way, as if you and she had all the time in the world to talk magazines. I slow down, act as if I’m doing a good deed. In two hours, I’ve got four sales. I feel great.

Until Melissa taps my shoulder. She is tonight’s supervisor, tall and well-groomed, with a hard, efficient way about her. Seems I’m ad-libbing a bit, she tells me, not mentioning the charity as much as I should, not thanking people enough for their support. She wants me to role-play with her, and words such as “isn’t that super!” pour flat and foolish from my mouth.

After I sign Melissa’s evaluation of my work, I got back to the telephones, dismayed and uptight. My shoulders hike as I think of Melissa pacing behind me, her black phone clicked to monitor my station. I end up with seven sales.

Day 3—Wednesday

Hey, do you smoke?” It’s Sally, the street mime rep down the table from me. It’s 7:30, break time, and I do smoke, at least for this week.

You live for these 10 minutes, the only chance to learn a co-worker’s face and name. Most of the faces are young—women and men in their 20s and 30s—and from the talk of cheerleading, camp and kids’ shoes, I gather nearly all the women are daytime moms. The men, I find, generally don’t talk to the women, but just stand off, solitary, blowing smoke into the night.

Sally thinks it’s an easy job. “I used to work for this frozen food company,” she says. “Cold calls. You weren’t allowed to hang up before the customer did. I lasted two weeks and used to go home like this—” she demonstrates, twisting her face and holding her head.

The room we work in has an odd feeling to it, with people burrowed in cubicles, supervisors circling and the air filled with a kind of unmusical “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” It’s the sound of everyone speaking the same script in different places: “…Telefoners. How are you tonight?…” “…thanks to you, we were able to give…” “…Just $6.99 in four installments…” Most reps seem friendly and professional, but a few seem a bit “out there,” unsocial zed.

We’re about as acquainted as people in a bus station. The computer is the real workmate, dialing relentlessly, making a prisoner of your attention.

That night, the supervisor crew attempts to foster team spirit by announcing the rep of the week. For five minutes, we all log off and applaud dutifully as someone’s name is announced, and applaud once more for someone who has made her conversion budget eight weeks in a row. Of course, I don’t know these people, and it doesn’t matter. In a moment, we’re dialing again.

Day 4—Thursday

I put my headphones down in disgust. Tonight I’m babbling, stumbling over names, hanging up instead of trying out counter-pitches. I feel embarrassed, acutely aware of bothering people.

The job is like a series of vaccinations. Each call has a painful sameness: “Sorry, not interested right now.” “This is a bad time for me to talk.” “I just got laid off.” “We can’t afford it this year.” I start to long for answering machines anonymous cheerful voices promising a call back.

“So, what’s going on?” Like radar, Alan senses my distress and plops down beside me. Turns out he’s got the spiel worked out beautifully. He shows how profusely he thanks people for their past subscriptions—“to break down the barrier, see?”—and then nuzzles them into telling him what kind of magazines they like.

“Remember,” he says, “it’s never what you say. It’s how you say it. You’ll be great.”

It’s corny, but I feel better. I start smiling through my script, pushing my shoulders down. Soon, I’ve turned my first “no” into a “yes,” selling a subscription to Good Housekeeping to a tired-sounding woman who hadn’t been interested just a minute before. I feel like high-fiving someone.

But my exhilaration is short-lived because it’s evaluation time. This time, Melissa points a long fingernail at some number goals we reps are expected to meet: $35 average orders (mine’s $26), 2.78 sales per hour (mine’s 1.75), 25 leads phoned per hour (mine’s 15.6). “But for now,” she says, “all I really care about is this number”—the conversion rate. Mine’s about 10.

“They’re so unrealistic!” one woman grouses at break time. “First they tell me to be more bubbly, then they tell me my voice is too high. They tell me I should be meting the same numbers as this girl next to me, but she’s here five nights a week and I’m here three!”

Another says, “after the holiday, I’m outta here.” We all nod vigorously.

Day 5—Friday

Tonight Melissa tells me to log on as a Group B rep instead of the training group. “Is there a difference?” I ask, suspicious. “No,” she shrugs.

There is. People are suddenly nicer. I’m hitting fewer layoffs, divorces and other maladies that plagued previous leads. And no dead people (a bit of a problem in Group C). Kev then tells me the training leads are old, people who’d been called five times already. “The fact that you could make any sales at all is amazing,” he says.

Suddenly I’m raking in three sales per hour, but I also feel cheated. I’ve been here five days, know almost no one, have never listened to a good phone rep at work and don’t know what else the company does. And now I find I’ve been set up for initial failure.

Thank God, my week is over. I tell Alan I’m leaving, then feel bad at his disappointment. “It’s not for everybody,” he says.

The room empties by 10 p.m., save for an unfamiliar supervisor in a baseball cap. “Sharon!” he says, like we’re old friends. “I was listening to you. You’ve got a great phone voice! You’re breaking my heart!”

“Yeah,” I say, and my smile is genuine. “You’ll get over it.”

<em>Postscript</em>

In the end, telemarketing turned out to be both easier and harder than I’d thought. Easier, in that the people I called were surprisingly kind. Few cut me off without an apology and no one used profanity. In fact, many even went so far as thanking me for calling and wishing me a good evening.

But it was harder because I’m not, at heart, a salesperson.

Years back, someone at a seminar once described three qualities possessed by ideal sales reps: the need to convince others of their point of view, empathy, and the ability to see “no” as a challenge, not a rejection. Personally, I possess the middle quality, one that’s not exactly helpful when one interrupts people eating their dinner. Kev, with his buddy-buddy charisma, proved to me that he had it all when he said: “Too many magazines! I love that objection! That’s my favorite!”

I’m’ not sure whether someone less pumped would ever <em>enjoy</em> telemarketing, but seems to me there are a number of ways the job could be made more pleasing.

Here’s my own list of suggestions for management:

1. Sell the company to the staff. If I felt good about Telefoners, I would have sold it better.

2. Set goals to accomplish, not “shoot for.” And reward those who get there.

3. Have newcomers monitor several good phone reps, as well as watch their body language and facial expressions.

4. Have reps work as team members, if possible. Set team goals and rewards, and have reps evaluate each other.

5. Offer flexible break time. Reps can then “reward” themselves instead of watching the clock.

One Final Note: A Telefoners rep phoned me at home the following week. I bought a subscription. After all, I felt bad for the guy.