** OT ** I thought we could all use a little humor. I grabbed this from thestreet.com which, BTW, I highly recommend. I hope Mr. Cramer won't mind.
BTW, the name Steve is just a coincidence...
Here goes...
I'll get things rolling with my worst cold call ever. Anyone
who does sales knows that the worst cold call has nothing to do with meanness; heck, that's part of the game. It has nothing to do with getting the door slammed in your face. At least you know not to bother anymore.
The worst cold call is one that works. One that gets you in the door, to where you shouldn't be. Where there's nothing behind the door!!
As my worst cold call client may be reading this for all I know -- although he may be too cheap pay for a sub to TSC -- I'll start the thread with the target cloaked in anonymity.
During the 1970s I fancied myself a great mountain climber. I had taken winter mountaineering courses and had become quite good with ice axe and crampons.
Most of my experience was in eastern mountains. I had climbed all 46 Adirondack mountains in the summer, and had started to do the same in winter, when work cut short my aspirations.
So once I got started at Goldman in the mid-80s, I thought because I liked that area so much I would ask for that territory. My boss said fine, I could have northern New York, north of Albany, and away I went. Talk about tough territories -- Willy Loman would have been right to end things if all he did was call on this area.
I parachuted myself upstate with some regularity, working chambers of commerce, reading local papers, and, of course, attending the Saratoga racing season. It was there, in the paddock, that I met my first great prospect of the region, a big-time guy, a guy who flashed money, who looked like money, a guy who told me that he was going to change horses and make the stock market his primary method of investment.
Let's call him Steve, because that was emphatically not his name. We went out to dinner at a steak place (I picked up the tab). He pumped me and pumped me and pumped me about how to look at the stock market, how to do it right. He talked about how he had made all his money in horses and that from what I told him, stocks sounded much, much better.
So began a remarkable relationship, in which Steve would call me four or five times a day for stock information, quotes, and macro commentary. Once a month I flew up to see him, usually just meeting at a restaurant after work, where again we did nothing but talk -- P/Es, interest rates, the way the market works. This guy loved it. He was the ideal pupil: wide-eyed, appreciative, thirsty.
Each time I went to see Steve I would have a new idea. Something that combined the wealth of thought from Goldman's research department along with my own.
The next day, back at the office, I would get a call from Steve. He monitored like a hawk everything I told him. He kept waiting for something he regarded as not expensive. Something that was "cheap," something that would stand out for value.
No matter what I suggested, I couldn't get him to pull the trigger. He said when he plunged he wanted it to be foolproof, something that would send it out of the park.
After five trips to Saratoga, and a year's worth of calling, I suggested Reebok, which at the time as at about $10. It wasn't on the recommended list. Hey, it wasn't even followed. But I had visited 24 Foot Lockers in three states, at the suggestion of my father, an aerobic's enthusiast, and found that the shoes of RBOK running out of stores. That, by the way, is the sign of at least six month's worth of explosive earnings.
Steve said he would sleep on it.
At 9:30 the next day, fully nine months after my first meeting with this titan, Steve said he thought a $10 stock was cheap. Didn't take a lot of money to buy a lot of shares. He wanted 2,000 worth, he said.
"Two thousand shares?" I asked in disbelief. "You want just 2000 shares?" (Talk about protocol violations, I know you are never supposed to do that. But I couldn't Olivier this thing. Not after the time I spent.)
"No, no, no, I don't have that kind of money," he said, compounding my confusion. " Two thousand dollars' worth, and not all at once, please. Can we start with 50 shares?"
Oh my God. Fifty shares? I wasn't even allowed to take orders that small.
I wasn't even supposed to open accounts with less than a million dollars.
Steve, I said, I think you should go to a discount broker for this.
"Aren't you a discount broker?"
Steve, no can do, I said.
"Please. You don't want to lose this sale after all the time you've spent developing this relationship."
Steve, I said, I got to get this cleared with my boss, and he won't clear it, I can tell you.
"Do your best."
I hung up the phone, waited 10 minutes, called Steve back and said, reluctantly, I couldn't take his order. And I told him that I was giving up his territory. Sorry.
Never spoke to him again.
Moral: Make sure the prospect is indeed a prospect. And be able to laugh about this kind of stuff, as I still do about Steve to this day. |
