For about a month in college I tried telemarketing which, if it’s possible, crushed my beaten-down self-esteem even more.
It was brutal.
I remember one client the firm was working for wanted to send free diapers to people and they’d somehow procured a subscription list from Parenting Magazine. So we had a pretty good list of contacts for people who might want some.
It should have been easy. You’re a new parent? We’d love to send you a free box of diapers and when you’re done with them, just fill out a card and mail it back telling us what you thought.
Easy peasy.
Outside of being in Little League, I’ve never been screamed at so many times in my life.
One of the things they prepped us with were some color coded cards with responses to people’s excuses for not wanting them. You could try to thwart the rejection with prepared and tested arguments set up in various sequential orders.
I quit and drove a cab for the rest of the Summer.
But my point and yes I have one, is that Radio People will encounter our consumers and need to be prepared to thwart their angry responses.
Every Spring except 2020 I will travel around to as many clients as I can and do Street School with the promo teams. The idea is to prep them for being the Faces of the radio station and train them on how to make as many great first-and-usually-only impressions as they can. Life is way too short to piss off even one person that you meet when you’re out, because I believe that God has a sense of humor and that person WILL eventually get a diary or a meter and boy are they going to remember you.
One of the things that I’ll hit is “t-shirts”. These are our best swag. And our most expensive swag. At one point or another in my career I have traded a shirt for pretty much…everything.
So, once I have impressed upon the team the true value of a shirt, I inform them that “Can I have a shirt?” is going to be BY FAR the #1 thing that they will be asked when out and representing the station, and that the reality is, they’re not always going to have some to hand out.
And this is where we have our Defense Cards ready to play.
Listener: “Can I have a shirt?”
Paige The Promo Guy: “No. Scott said we’re on a spending freeze until January 1st.”
Listener: “Huh?”
We’re in Radio. We’re in Showbiz. We’re six degrees separated from Spielberg. (“Bob Spielberg” who runs the Dumbo ride at Disneyland.) Not having a budget for shirts? It makes no sense.
My Defense Card for when I don’t have a shirt to hand them?
Listener: “Can I have a shirt?”
Paige The Promo Guy: “Dang™. We were just down at the Reggae Fest at Bayshore Park and went through 800 shirts in about five minutes. Can I give you a sticker/cold bottle of water/the batteries from the emergency flashlight in the SUV, and try to hook you up next time we’re down here?”
Yes. I just lied. But you lied when you invited people to join you at a car dealership for pizza ‘and fun.’ Because no one has ever had fun as a car dealership.
And for all of the years I’ve been telling that lie, people have generally accepted it. It would make sense that this giant behemoth entity of the Show Business Industry would get mobbed for shirts.
But then…what happens…when you actually do have a shirt?
For a Millenia we have been giving shirts to people and have pretty much trained the global populace that if they ask, they could get a shirt. And let’s be honest: people will ask stations that they’ve never heard of for a shirt.
The weekend that we launched WiLD in Tampa we blitzed the beaches and gave out just tons and tons of shirts. Unfortunately it was Memorial Day weekend and probably 90% of the people we gave shirts to were from outside of the market. Some girl went back to Georgia with a great WiLD 98.7 shirt.
That didn’t really help us that much.
Revisiting the “a shirt is the best swag ever” theory, here is what I’ve done when I’ve had a shirt to spare:
Listener: “Can I have a shirt?”
Paige The Promo Guy: “Absolutely, what did Mike & Iris do this morning when the lady called in and said she’d found a hundred unredeemed lotto tickets in her husbands desk drawer?”
Listener: “They got a bunch of losing tickets and swapped them out to prank the husband when he finally goes to the Plaid Pantry to cash them out.”
Paige The Promo Guy: “Exactly! Thanks for listening! Wear it proudly.”
If they didn’t know, they usually did the next time I ran into them. And if they did know and got the shirt, it’s possible that I just converted someone from “listener” to “fan”. And it’s pretty hard to beat a brand that has fans.
See? That wasn’t hard. You just have to have your defense strategy already planned out.
Next? “Why doesn’t anyone ever answer the request line?”
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