CorpComms Magazine

Sales of white goods go down. Hot beverages and home baking go up. Eating out takes a dive. What is it? Yes, of course you guessed it, we're in a recession, and every journalist in the country is seeking out examples of its effects to frighten us all and deepen our depression.

As someone who has been through this before, I'd like to put forward another recession indicator. It is one that I do not believe econometricians have ever attempted to build into their models, but it is so much worse than recruitment freezes or bonus holidays. With recession comes a proportionate rise in cold callers.

With shrinking advertising revenues, cancelled corporate hospitality and slashed marketing budgets, the volume of cold selling has simply gone off the scale. While since the last recession, call centre infrastructure has come of age, so the means to generate millions of irrelevant and unsolicited calls exists. In terms of technology development this ranks alongside the introduction of the machine gun in warfare as, like the persistent rattle of Lewis guns on the Somme spraying their indiscriminate streams of death, you will be targeted for the attentions of the call centre, carefully 'chosen' from six million others from the dirtiest mailing list on the planet.

Warning signs

What is to be done? Well, it is first necessary to recognise the call for what it is - a total waste of time. Here are some clues. The babble of hundreds of call centre operators in the background, callers who use the phrase How are you today? while namedropping should give rise to extreme caution and suspicion. Popular references quoted are the United Nations, government departments and the emergency services.

Here are some tips on how to emerge from this curse of our times with your budgets and sanity in tact. Firstly, never EVER give the caller a window to call again. Bite the bullet and close him down TODAY!

For most people, simply hanging up is a difficult thing to do and, in any case, it does not necessarily represent closure. But if you do resort to this 'final solution' make sure you hang up whilst talking. Nobody would do that, would they? It must be a fault on the line. No point ringing back. Move on to the next victim.

Spot the stooges

Identify those in your organisation with the dual characteristics of budget signoff authority and ego - chief executives, marketing directors... that sort of person. These are prime targets for telesales operators, who flatter to deceive using terms like opinion leader, thought leader and decision maker. The cold callers position the pitch such that, if your colleague refuses to impulse buy, they imply a humiliating denial of his status and authority. Keep cold callers well away from these guys.

And finally, your ultimate first line of defence - your artillery in the face of the machine gun brigade - the secretary. Sadly, the secretary may have been a casualty of new technology in the office while recession driven cutbacks will lead to further attrition. Nevertheless, well trained in the above and other tactics, the secretary can take and return fire in your battle with the call caller while you, safely tucked up in your bunker, can get on with more important matters. 

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