Matthew Botos

Here’s a good quote from the movie Boiler Room:

And there is no such thing as a no sale call. A sale is made on every call you make. Either you sell the client some stock or he sells you a reason he can’t. Either way a sale is made, the only question is who is gonna close? You or him? Now be relentless, that’s it, I’m done.

There’s an even better scene where the main character forces a newspaper phone salesman to give him a real pitch before telling him he gets a rival paper. What made me think of it tonight was that I finally reached one-year on my VOIP contract and could cancel without a termination fee. Only I called the wrong number to cancel: 800-TRY-VOIP instead of 866-TRY-VOIP.

Naturally it’s another phone company. When the guy couldn’t look up my account, he asked what company I was calling and I finally realized my mistake. Even though I initially told him I was calling to cancel, he never tried to sell me on switching to his company!

The cynic in me would point out that this is what happens when you outsource to a call center in India where the name of the company on the script is just as interchangable as the management think the workers are.