I realize that the days of telemarketing may be well on their way out the door, but I couldn’t help making some field-appropriate mental substitutions as I watched the clip below. If this guy was schooling a performing arts ticket/season subscription package selling representative, how would this call likely have played out? It’s a world of deliberately uninformed citizenry out there, people. How would you get this guy to put down his cereal spoon and consider investing in something (statistically speaking) likely outside his usual interest set?
It wasn’t a phone call but an actual old-fashioned door-to-door sales pitch that recently converted me on a product I initially thought I had absolutely no interest in even learning any more about. Just before the primary race here in Baltimore, a political candidate stopped by at what was clearly the end of a very long day for both of us. He introduced himself, and though I really didn’t want to listen to him, I decided to give him a couple minutes rather than be rude (you may call me a sucker in the comments). He told me a bit about his goals and skills, and explained why he thought he should be my candidate. He told me what the benefit of his work would be to me. Despite my initial skepticism, I liked him and what he was selling (which in this case were pretty much one and the same). Two minutes later, he was gone.
But the visit stuck with me. It reminded me that I actually cared about local politics and had been slacking in the face of other deadlines and distractions. This man had reached out to me, not online but in person, and, in so doing, had motivated me to do my research and visit the polls the following Tuesday. He had given me a clear opportunity that it was within my means to act upon and that potentially benefited us both. In today’s stressed marketplace, the power of such active personal contact, even if initially unwanted and unfamiliar, cut more loudly through the noise than ever before. I haven’t stopped thinking about it since.
What if players (and staff members) in symphony orchestras actually went out (in pairs for safety) canvassing neighborhoods to tell people what they did and why? I’ll bet that kind of face-to-face contact would interest a lot of people in a kind of music they never thought would appeal to them, too. If they had small free sample CDs to take with them, so much the better!