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Comment by bee_rider | Hacker News Reader

> I know a good salesman when I see one. I was, briefly, the No. 1 telemarketer in the United States.

Oh neat, how?

> Unlike many of my less successful colleagues, I quickly learned to take yes for an answer; though we were legally required to read a long list of mandatory disclosures to all our sales, I noticed that this often broke the spell and gave people an opening to back out or “wait and ask the wife about it.” As soon as I heard a yes, I said, “Great choice!” and transferred them to confirmation. My manager occasionally came by and reminded me that it was technically illegal to skip my disclosures, but he made commission off my commission, and his tone made it clear that I could do as I pleased as long as I kept putting up numbers.

[…]

> I was one of the first to go, technically for not making my required disclosures—about cancellation fees, international rates, all that fine print nobody ever bothered to recite—on a sale.

So, he and his boss did crime together for a while and then eventually their scam stopped working and he got fired.

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Articles like this are valued not based on how noble is the protagonist but based on how truthful is the account. The latter is of course not granted either but I would be even less inclined to believe a story of an airtight telemarketer.

In general I think it's very easy to _not understand_ people i.e. "how could you". The interesting part for me is when I do understand: "oh this is how". From that perspective I enjoyed this read quite a bit.

To reward positive stories that include crime, just because other people "might also be doing it" is ehhh. That's literally what criminals tell themselves, that everyone else does it.

For a liar and a cheater, it's basic modus operandi to tell you some of their lies to give themselves a veneer of honesty.

Agree with you in some sense, it is what it is, but why trust anything else they say to "rescue the story"? That's the game they play.

Is it not that we grant that person no reward, and instead take from their story lessons to our benefit?

The little in the story that speaks about the author, is necessary as a vehicle to narrate the experience.

The crux of the story is sales, and how it worked. The core point was the dehumanization, as well as the people who are the most effective in this era.

Also, I can appreciate someones shoes, while acknowlding they are a terrible person. Style isnt the causative factor for criminality or bad decision making.

A more mature position than mine, thanks for perspective.

Yes, if people are being crooks I'd rather know about it than to believe everyone has the same ethical code as myself.

> Is it not that we grant that person no reward, and instead take from their story lessons to our benefit?

I think that this is the way how most reasonable/average people will view it? Reading the article doesn't make me think: "Gee, I should swindle some people out of a lot of money for personal gain!" but rather feel happy that my own career doesn't put me in a spot where I'd need to do anything similar to that.

And even if someone does take that as a playbook, it's not like the article is advocating for that or that author would benefit from that (e.g. like the lifestyle gurus and self-proclaimed pros at anything, that are almost always selling courses, often coupled with a get rich scheme).

> In general I think it's very easy to _not understand_ people i.e. "how could you". The interesting part for me is when I do understand: "oh this is how".

“How could you” is a rhetorical question to which the asker already knows the answer they would be given, which is almost invariably “because I lack empathy”.

This is not... good sales. This is making the numbers. The customers acquired with this method are not good customers.

To future salespeople in here: please work on selecting customers carefully, and pitch only to great two-way fits. That way, both customer and your organisation will thrive.

I get that the salesperson is judged by volume closed, but this gives the rest of the organisation churn problems to deal with.

I can’t remember if it’s against HN rules to implore people to read the actual article.

The reason he became good at selling (according to the article) is because he changed his attitude despite reading the sales scripts verbatim both before and after his attitude adjustment.

It’s an interesting and probably helpful lesson for the startup hustlers here on HN if they can make it through this admittedly long essay.

> despite reading the sales scripts verbatim both before and after his attitude adjustment

The article states that he was fired because he did not read the script he was required to read.

The article states that he was fired because the company had financial problems, and not reading the required stuff was used as an excuse

The point is he did not read the scripts verbatim as you claimed.

(Wasn't me claiming that, read usernames)

Yeah, but you are, at least seemingly, missing the point: the scripts he was referring to in context weren't the legal disclosures but the sales tricks that were handed to them to use. He is pointing out that the 'elite' saleswoman wasn't better at strategy or sales tricks, but was effective because she made them feel good.

The article was also written by someone who is not a reliable narrator.

The type of person who would skip the legally required stuff while working as a telemarketer is exactly the kind of person who'd tell you he got fired for a "technicality", while he was actually fired because he was breaking the law and lying to customers.

Especially considering that even the unreliable narrator himself admits he was one of the first ones to be fired - why would you fire the best employee first if it wasn’t for cause?

It is against the rules to imply that the person you are responding to hasn’t read the article, but I don’t think it is against the rules to implore the community to read it, generally.

Also just to be more explicit, people can (should) read the article and decide. It is not super long and it is engagingly written. I think the author is kind mythologizing his job… there’s clearly a fraud component to how he got better, and a skill improvement component. It isn’t obvious which contributed more from his telling, and given that his telling is probably inclined to put him in a good light, I lean toward the fraud.

I doubt there is such a thing as good sales from telemarketing. It's almost by definition a way to make a buck with no cares whatsoever if the person will ever return.

It's amazing how often "illegally" is the American Way. I only wish it were a joke.

Americans surely do love to make things illegal.

https://www.amazon.com.au/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent...

Three felonies a day for everyone. More if you use a computer.

It's kind of amazing how no one seems to care that the only reason why they aren't in prison currently is that no one's bothered to arrest them yet.

52 bucks for the paperback! That price is a felony!

It's by design to be able to go after anyone. Well known dictatorship method.

The occasional, feeble, rarely enforced speed bumps that we occasionally throw up around some largely performative ideal that working people shouldn’t just get constantly ripped off via structural advantage for self-styled job creators almost always lead to temporary increases in broad based prosperity as judged by honest and humane notions of the common good for Res Publica. A limited but meaningful subset of the population was seeing substantial increases in prosperity in the post war period of comparatively high taxation and comparatively high regulation. It sucks that we didn’t extend those benefits to minorities, that was a glaring flaw, but that was fixable without throwing the whole thing out and handing the reins over to Art Laffer and Milton Friedman and other goblins like that.

This is a culture so extreme around its idea of private property and private enterprise that treating human beings as property is a habit of thought as a culture we just can’t seem to quit in spite of a bloody, declared civil war and a thousand violent skirmishes that don’t quite qualify as wars.

We’re now deep into a regression on this that has the typical person struggling via a combination of monopoly and monopsony pricing power enabled by blank check lobbyism that creates de facto indentured status for anyone with a kid who needs medication.

Low effort quips from people who haven’t felt cold or hunger or illness recently enough to remember are a serious part of the problem.

Alas, the straw man you argue against doesn't exist. (Though my adopted homeland of Singapore probably comes closer than the so called Land of the Free.)

Remember: even Bill Gates had to fight for a decade or so to get his favourite car imported. And that was when he was the richest guy on the planet. Bloomberg and Romney lost their bids for the presidency against much poorer opponents with less support from the rich. You guys still have minimum wage laws on the books, too. Rent control and price controls ('anti-price gouging laws') are ever popular. To name just a few examples.

> This is a culture so extreme around its idea of private property and private enterprise that treating human beings as property is a habit of thought as a culture we just can’t seem to quit in spite of a bloody, declared civil war and a thousand violent skirmishes that don’t quite qualify as wars.

You know that (orthodox) economics is known as the dismal science because they opposed slavery? See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dismal_science

Please don't brand Milton Friedman as some kind of slavery advocate.

> Low effort quips from people who haven’t felt cold or hunger or illness recently enough to remember are a serious part of the problem.

I don't think they make much of a difference on way or another. But you are right, that thanks to relatively freer markets, more and more people can enjoy the ignorance of bliss of not knowing what hunger feels like. That's how progress looks like.

It is beyond dispute that liberalizing the markets in a society is an almost guaranteed way to lift a society out of a confused manufacturing sector and into a much better organized manufacturing sector: markets are a much better way to price cars and consumer electronics than planning committee guesses. No one disputes that other than Jensen Huang.

But using a log scale and a ruler to apologize for flagrant grift is nothing to do with capitalism, markets, democracy, common sense, or humanity.

Rent seeking is the original sin of capitalism: don’t take my word for it, re-read your Adam Smith and pay attention this time.

And if by “you guys” you mean advocates for the broader public?

To the death.

US consumer protection law is actually fairly feeble compared to, say, the EU equivalents, generally (for a particularly dramatic example see treatment of EULAs and similar). The US does seem keen on making regulations terribly _complex_, but not particularly strong.

> Americans surely do love to make things illegal.

That's certainly not the issue here - where the secret was to avoid informing or giving time to think by skipping the fine print.

"Behind every great fortune lies a great crime"

In this case it is more like “Behind every mediocre fortune is a pretty lame crime.”

Like it isn’t even a cool crime, like doing a heist or something. It’s just tricking confused people by not letting them know about the fine print.

Yep, fraud is pretty lame…

Or to translate a dutch expression, "whoever does not steal or inherit will work until they die" (it rhymes in dutch).

The owning class wants no competitors. The only way to get there is to break the rules that those who got there before create and enforce.

What makes you think this is uniquely American versus human?

On the contrary, it’s the immigrants that understand it better than the native born.

This whole thing feels like drawing blood from stone. If your company/industry is abusive and miserly, you can go above and beyond and still make a pittance. If you put in the effort, the years, whatever, what you could get is a token recogniton of your efforts like raising your wages from minimum wage to 30% above that.

Poverty, scarcity and desperation drives people to evil. If you work a stable job for a respectable wage for an industry that makes money, and is willing to share said money with you, all this stuff sounds strange to you.

All the machiavellian scheming and power games that take place in a call center on the shift manager level might only show up close to C-level in an IT company, as its only there that the opportunities grow scarce enough, and the people desperate enough that these darwinian environments arise.

This is why sales is such a difficult medium to respect even if it's clearly a craft. There's a dance but no music.

It's less about sales being a difficult medium to respect.

There might be more about the people and the behaviour they are choosing. Like anything it has to be managed, because it's only a sale when the customer is satisfied to retain the sale, let alone renew.

Getting good at helping qualified leads can be just fine.

If inbound is garbage, it invites less than ideal behaviour.

It varies to be honest, the one in the article - telemarketing, or broader speaking, selling something they don't need to someone - is scummy. But when working in IT you have to make a decision on a solution, be it a library, a service, or something like that; the role of sales becomes more difficult then, and will involve presentations, live demos, POCs, etc.

tbf, this is to sales what "I developed a shell script that automatically appends extended comments and now I'm the highest line-of-code outputting developer in my cheap IT outsourcing company" is to software development....

So... the thing that made him America's top telemarketer was... illegally omitting the disclosures... which everyone was doing... but also, it made him uniquely successful because many of his colleagues didn't do it?

I'm getting the strangest feeling that maybe this guy isn't done peddling bullshit?

sounds like hes setting the stage for a movie script - "wolf of wall street 2"

The wolf of wallstreet 2 should be about the making of the wolf of wallstreet: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-52661779 the whole thing is crazier than the original.

I'm surprised Hollywood hasn't jumped all over that yet lol.

This reminds me of how the film Catch Me If You Can about a credit card / pilot con man was in itself a con and the whole story was made up. It's great, the author did not actually commit any of the crimes he "confessed" to, and at best there's a civil case of the claim of the story being true events not in fact being true. But I hope the filmmakers had a good laugh about the irony.

Wolf of Wall Street even opens by reminding the viewer that Belfort is a convicted fraudster, you are watching and listening to him tell his version of the story, and he's almost certainly lying to you.

The difference between a racounteur and a bullshitter is that one is entertaining.

> So... the thing that made him America's top telemarketer was... illegally omitting the disclosures... which everyone was doing... but also, it made him uniquely successful because many of his colleagues didn't do it?

And Uber is a taxi company that doesn't own taxis, AirBnB is a hotel chain that owns no hotels. Find a hyper-successful company or person, and start digging. The secret 99/100 times is crime (or incredibly crime-adjacent behaviors).

Hotel chains frequently don't own hotels, but rather franchise their name to them.

Similarly, taxi companies are much less ethical than you're implying here. Often more criminal too.

Isn't it "always" rather than "frequently"? In case of hotels. Hotel chains are brand operators, their job is to build up brand value through ads, enforcing quality standards within hotels of their chain, and managing their loyalty program. They are not supposed to operate hotels, let alone own them.

Because entities that operate hotels (paying royalty to the hotel chain), almost always do not own the hotels per se i.e. real estate. They rent it. From holding companies that did not build it, they bought them ready from real estate developers who start a project targeting several potential buyers usually picking the actual one while construction is near finishing. And the developer is also not building the building, construction company does it, the developer just manages the land deal, licensing, permitting, and architectural designs, asking construction company to do particular phases of work with a particular budget. And that one then subcontracts different things to different entities, who in turn manage imports of the labor force and materials and manage people who do the work... The chain is looong.

> Uber is a taxi company that doesn't own taxis, AirBnB is a hotel chain that owns no hotels

Most taxi companies don’t own cars. Almost none of the hotel operators own real estate.

> secret 99/100 times is crime

Nope. This is the excuse of stupid criminals.

It's kind of like claiming you're the world's best trader, but all your winnings come from insider trading.

That's fine, when and where that's legal.

Eg even the US has no laws against insider trading in commodities. Similarly, French insider trading laws work on rather different principles than US ones. So it's hard to attach much moral significance to the legal accident of insider trading laws in one place and one time.

(And arguably, laws banning insider trading are bad for the general public, because to the extent they are respected and enforced, they keep information out of market prices.)

True, but they also make it hard for a cynical exec to game the system, for instance by shorting the stock and then tanking the company on purpose.

Contracts and laws around fiduciary duties already handle that just fine.

This is exactly what the laws around fiduciary duty "really" cover. I say "really" because the term is often invoked to justify/excuse scummy behavior from executives, arguing that they're legally obligated to behave that way because of fiduciary duty. In reality it just means you must act in the interests of the company, largely to prevent this exact sort of scenario (or an exec just being butthurt or whatever).

Yes, though it goes a bit further than just a blanket 'in the interest of the company'.

Sometimes it's that, sometimes it's in the interested of the shareholders, sometimes it's also in the interest of (some) customers, etc.

> the thing that made him America's top telemarketer was... illegally omitting the disclosures

Honestly, when I’m on a call with customer service I could do without being reminded every microsecond that I’m actually on a phone call that might be recorded.

Appealing to be recorded in secret is a weird one to read in the morning. Another solution to your problem that respects the law is for them to not record you.

> Another solution to your problem that respects the law is for them to not record you

You'd run a customer-service operation that has no record of who said what?

Where I live companies are required to get my explicit consent before recording me and are also required to continue the call if the only reason they would not is that I didn't consent to being recorded.

It'd be a bit silly if not as where I live I can also request them to delete the recording immediately after the call ends. So yes many businesses operate like this.

When you go to a shop and talk to the person there for help with a previous purchase they aren't recording your interaction, why is it so surprising?

I worked in a professional services department that did not record calls, except at the request of the customer. We took copious notes on each call, shared things that showed up repeatedly over a few days to weeks in wikis, and shared things that showed up repeatedly over a single morning in Slack channels.

I thought it was a series of realizations - First he learned to stop sounding like he hated his job, and focus on making the other persons feelings. This got him to people saying "yes".

To close more, he started dropping the disclosures and sending people to the next department.

The point you are raising does make sense, I suppose the lesson for him was getting to yes, and then ensuring you dont blow the lead. Which I suppose is the core lesson to selling. You cant sell if people get out of the flow.

And he does allude to this, that the economy is small constant hustles that convince people to buy things, as opposed to the sterile idea of economic demand.

A great mentor once taught me, "when you hear a yes, immediately agree and stop selling." Usually this means stop talking.

My company is a division in a political minefield that is the greater organization. In particular, my company is filled with people who have spent their entire careers as rank and file workers with their heads down and never had to develop the political savvy to steer through the minefield.

I don't know how many times I've told, and to how many coworkers, if the enemy is going to hang himself, stop talking and give him more rope.

The disclosure should be outside the phone conversation prior to funds transferring.

Send them to confirmation who should have a process of, we're sending you the email now where you enter you make an account and enter payment details. Stay on the phone with them while they do it to avoid drop off rates. During the account creation is the disclosures.

That’s why you don’t answer phone calls with „yes” as sometimes they would say your name and you would be inclined replying „yes, speaking”.

Just heard stories some shitty companies/sales would push you over they have your „yes” on recording. I don’t believe it would hold in any court if they would have to play the whole thing. But it would work on people who are not so tough.

Sattelite TV sellers were awful they almost got my mother to buy second one because they told her BS new one will void competition contract and then sales rep was pushy she wanted to back out - good thing was she did not sign anything before asking me.

So yeah I have seen some pushy idiots pushing old people or not confident people into signing stuff.

Few years in my ago we had telemarketing company. "Good morning Orange". No, that was their name. People thought they were from Orange company, but they just were stating their full name ;)

So many people got scammed.

It's also why I don't have any respect for the sales people.

There is no evidence of a company using the fact that you've said "yes" at a random point in the conversation as confirmation that you've agreed to their (maybe unheard) pitch, despite variations on that urban legend doing the rounds for years.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/can-you-hear-me-scam/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Can_you_hear_me%3F_(alleged_te...

I just read in the article and I replied to a comment that has:

I noticed that this often broke the spell and gave people an opening to back out or “wait and ask the wife about it.” As soon as I heard a yes, I said, “Great choice!” and transferred them to confirmation. My manager occasionally came by and reminded me that it was technically illegal to skip my disclosures, but he made commission off my commission, and his tone made it clear that I could do as I pleased as long as I kept putting up numbers.

Sales is about closing. He ignored rules to do it. Is it 'right' no. But he was successful at it for awhile.

The two most epic sales I ever saw where these.

One guy I saw some how resurrected a customer of ours. I flat out asked him. His words to me were 'I have no idea how I did it'. While he was saying that he pulled out his wallet and started laying 20s on the table. 'you didnt...' 'i have no idea what you are asking'.

The second one was in the dead of july at a garage sale my family was running. Suddenly a guy comes up and hands me money for a Christmas lightbulb (who put that out there?!). 'did you just get that guy to buy a light bulb' 'i showed him how he needed it'.

Sales is not about doing the right thing. But creating a need and filling it and closing the sale. In the first case he showed the guy that he needed money. In the second somehow he talked the guy into needing a lightbulb before Christmas. It works even better if you somehow get the customer to think they came up with the idea.

If you understand that rule of 'creation' you can actually make yourself immune to most sales bots. The first thing most do is create a need and magically they can fill it with the thing they just happen to sell.

Reminds me of the guys in The Big Short who don’t realize they’re fiddling while Rome is about to burn.

Lying and breaking the law are ok as long as everyone keeps making money.

Unfortunately that is pretty much how society works. As long as the right people are making money, or getting paid off by the people who are making money.

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