As a disclaimer, I do not endorse scamming. This is just a blog post taking a look at how scammers could improve by doing only a few simple things.
Just about every week I get a call from India. This call consists of the same things every time. The man on the other line asks for Norma, I proceed to tell him that I am not Norma, he then does not believe me that I am not Norma and tries to get me to use his back brace to help with my “pain”. The first few times I received this call I got very upset and made the caller put his manager on the phone, which I am pretty sure was just the person sitting next to him pretending to be his manager. After many, many frustrating calls, I gave up on answering my phone if it is not a number I recognize.
If this scammer wanted to actually be good at his job, he would implement sales techniques that actually work. For example, the scammer could start off the conversation by asking me what my name was. This flips the conversation off of him and onto the customer. He then should ask me if he could have a few minutes of my time to ask me a few questions. This is so he can figure out what kinds of things actually bring me pain to know how to scam me. After I uncover my pain, he should answer any of my questions with a question as to hold off on giving all of the benefits of his product away. We might then go into a conversation in which case I get a little nervous about proceeding with this deal. This is the perfect opportunity for him to come back at me suggesting that we might not be a good fit. This pulls my attention in because I don’t actually want to lose the good deal he is giving me! The next step for this scammer is to close the deal and ask for my credit card information, birth date, and my social security number. Overall, I think if anyone can benefit from sales techniques, it would be scammers. Their selling is very lacking and results in many people hanging up on them.
testacr22 
Trinity Blank 
Caroline Marie Dawson
I cannot stand these calls either. It has gotten to the point where I can tell if it is a scam just by the location the call is coming from. These are some great points about how they could improve their tactics. I really like the point about asking your name.
Let’s hope they keep sucking at sales then, because I can’t say that I have ever gotten a scam call I couldn’t recognize to be a scam. I think the thing that makes me angry the most is how scammers target older people because they are much easier targets.
Sales calls suck. As we have talked about in class, they are most likely scripted and the telemarketers are encouraged to do whatever it takes to keep the person on the phone. I agree with what Ed said above, where in some ways I hope they don’t change their ways because I can easily tell if it’s a scam. For the rest of the business world that does cold-calls, if they want to make a sale, or even pique interest, they really should learn some better techniques!