A) most investors had a broker not just for advice, but because there was no easy way to trade individually or get live stock quotes until the internet was widespread and matured
B) telephone sales in general were more common then and less likely to be a scam (Stratton Oakmont and other boiler rooms played a large role in shifting public opinion on this)
C) The most desirable prospects (High Net Worth Individuals) were accustomed to dealing with legitimate brokers over the phone and being solicited by brokers from other legitimate firms in such a way
D) The markets were raging in such a way that everyone had FOMO and was dying to hear of a hot new tip
Almost nobody legitimate in the financial advising world acquires customers via cold call pitching anymore. Cold calling is still part of the toolkit for other sales niches (eg, tech sales) but it's a tough road with a low success rate.
Caller had to pay long distance costs at the time and really until you got in the later 90s early 2000's did you start seeing unlimited long distance everywhere.
Getting cold calls from random people way back then was super rate because it was expensive.
A 'Frictionless' ability to transmit puts all the friction, pain, and negative externalities onto the recipient.
Bitcoin itself, as with most early cryptocurrencies, is and was a protest against banks and centralized finance.
[0] (or however much energy you want to demand before throwing the message in the spam folder - you just require whatever number of leading zeros in the hash ie crank up the difficulty, bitcoin's innovation was assigning ownership to these proofs-of-work via signatures and implementing a mechanism to update and broadcast that ownership)
should be doable
From what I understand, the caller ID feature is completely useless. There is no willingness to implement rules that guarantee the number the call is coming from is the owner of the number. The best you can do is call them back and hope the routing doesn't get screwed up.
I know where I work there are some rules about presenting whatever number you want on our trunk provider, but this is something they have put in place themselves with no "legal" reason for them to do it. We've been working with them for years so we are one of their trusted clients and have the ability to present any number we want as long as we have permission to do so from the number owner.
The fact its up to the trunk provider to put these rules in place and not just standard everywhere is wild to me.
Pay numbers are a thing so I guess it should be doable.
No. We should have complete control on how much friction anybody gets to communicating with us. And frictionless should absolutely not be the default.
I recall I used to individually send snaps to like 30 friends each time, back before Snapchat invented Stories. I had to think a tiny bit, and put a tiny bit of effort, for each person. We lost that when people started posting to stories only.
PS. Brings back memories. Won an US, national high school "paper trading" contest back in the day. Out of 14000 participants. Was quite proud ...
I distinctly remember we used a newspaper that I think is still around called IBD "Investors Business Daily", and they had this system that worked really well ("C-A-N-S-L-I-M").-
And I remember pouring over thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of possibilities each day, and basically doing fundamental and technical analysis. I would filter out the candidates with broad technical analysis and then review the fundamentals of each, looking up each company on huge binders - yes, paper - from a subscription service the school had that had all financial and other info for all listed companies.-
And it worked out. At some point, I caught a few big ones that just went ballistic. And it worked out great. One of the things it did is it taught me the value of effort. And I distinctly remember another thing, too. I distinctly remember being called by the organization to let me know I was winning, having won, all but certainly.-
And the day after that, right before the closing of the ranking, running out of trades - because one had a limited amount of trades to perform during the competition. So I could not close a position I had, which had earned me a lot, so I wound up at a loss after having won, which, and I shall never forget this, ended up with my teacher basically saying, "I have seen how much effort you put into this, so I will give you -my account- to handle, so you can continue trading, so you will always remember that hard work and effort pays off in the end".-
In the end I did loose my ranking and with too little time could not catch up, even with the second account.-
So, I lost, but - in a way - I won, because I "won" that lesson ...
And gush bump it, it's a lesson I've never forgotten.-
So thank you, Mr. Brown.-
No, I did not.-
PS. Funny thing is I remember being asked, by the organization - whether I was going to go into finance at the time. Of course, I emphatically said that I was.-
I guess "life" took over. It is what happens to you while you make other plans, after all ...
... but the lesson(s) learned have remained with me.-
(And, in the days before the internet their listings were great ...)
Smart, actually.-
It's more sophisticated now, and like you, when I was in school (middle school in the late 80s), we just tracked our portfolio performance using daily newspapers. I remember buying a couple of symbols for companies I'd never even heard of, and knew nothing about. Probably not the best that this was a thing led by our social studies teacher.
Actually, these "wargames" serve another IMHO crucial purpose - and another lesson I gathered from the whole experience, early: Learn to invest. And learn to invest as an structural part of one's development.-
In our world of limited source credibility and disdain for expertise, this video and the script do seem like throwbacks to another time.
Even worse is door-to-door sales. My neighborhood has big "no soliciting" signs at the entrances, but at certain times of the year we get huge swaths of salesmen and it's typically for the exact same services at different times of year. Once I was working on my boat late at night in my garage with the door halfway open. I had a pesticide service salesman zip up my driveway on a segway and come inside my garage and start pitching. I couldn't help but to lose my stuff on him. Do these tactics really work? Is it a certain demographic? Because I just don't grok.
Funny story, only once did that fail to get them to go away. In that case, it was a couple of Mormons and they took me up on the offer (leaving me wishing I actually had some sort of satanic sales pitch). They were very nice and pleasant company, and we ended up spending a couple of hours talking about the music of Frank Zappa.
But I didn't become a Mormon.
It really was. I think the reason they did and the others didn't was that they understood that I wasn't being serious, but the others thought I was. They laughed when I made the offer and said "sounds great!".
But, to your point, once they agreed I wasn't really in a position to say "no, never mind" without losing a bit of face.
...shit. But yeah, I moved.
Now, you might be thinking "Nah, that sounds too much like work" but consider the benefit: you won't be blacklisted only by Mormon missionary trainer 1 and trainee 2, but no Mormon will ever visit your home ever again, because you are in their LDS ward.
Mormons are usually the least objectionable of all the door-knockers. They tend to be genuinely friendly (or at least are able to fake it really well), respectful, don't do the "hard sell", and when I tell them I'm not interested, they honor my statement and leave without trying to change my mind or guilt-trip me.
How many random people would you need to ask before you found someone who was pondering joining a gym this very morning and would love some more info about it?
I've never understood why anyone would think this would matter. Like they're camping in our neighborhood for the week and this saves everyone money somehow?
Or the other tactic where they say "you might have noticed my truck around as I've done some work for <neighbor> and will be at <other neighbor>'s house later..."
They name people whose door they knocked on, got their name, and likely rejected. But they use those names on other prospects which makes it sound like word of mouth, the best form of advertising! "Oh, if my neighbor is using this guy for <Service> he must be good"... Really a brilliant tactic that I bet fools some people.
The only guy I really admired (but didn't use because I thought his prices were far too high) was a guy going door to door offering to clean the outside windows. He wanted $10/window and I was like no way. I'm sure he got a few customers.
It was only after just about every door-to-door salesman used that excuse that I clued in that he's probably just a sales guy going to random neighborhoods and not actually one of the workers on the ground doing the job. Anyway, my point is most people don't think about these things, and especially not new homeowners, and probably just take their word.
Regarding the $10/window guy: I've been meaning to get out the ladder and clean all my windows myself but have been lazy, so if somebody actually showed up at my door, quoted a price, and said they'd do it right then and there, I might take them up on the offer. It's really just a numbers game for them.
As for the “in the area” thing, it sounds logical at first and I’ve heard of neighbors negotiating a discount by getting the same job done by the same vendor but for jobs that take a good while if not multiple days, it just doesn’t matter.
This seems obvious to me. My neighbours were getting their gutters cleaned and needed to come in to our garden, I asked the guys if they'd do ours as well. We didn't negotiate too hard on price, but I'm sure if pushed they would have taken something less than they'd charge to drive out and set up their equipment from scratch.
If I actually needed what the salesman was selling, I would have bought it already myself. This is true for everything I've ever purchased. The fact that they have to push it on me proves that it's negative-EV and I have no problem just hanging up or closing the door. I guess not everyone finds this easy.
This assumes it's a frictionless commodity. I want a pizza, I buy a pizza. I'm not interested in cold calls selling me pizza because if I wanted one, I would've already gone to the pizza shop down the road.
However, not everything is like this. Jobs, for example, are the opposite extreme. If someone cold-calls me asking me a job interview, well, this actually happened (not via a phone call) and led to me moving halfway around the world and having to learn a second language. Did I get scammed? Ich denke nicht.
In the realm of actual products, there are might be things you think about buying for a long time, and then eventually you see a good deal and buy it. Cold calls may help you find a good deal (I doubt it now - but back in the era when they weren't just spam) and then you may buy it.
There's also just advertising, especially for B2B where everything is more opaque. I have no idea where to get advanced Ethernet switch ASICs ("merchant silicon" as they call it) and you can't even Google it because the information isn't public. If I was a networking company and some switch ASIC company called me to tell me they make switch ASICs and here's our product selection guide, that would actually be welcome information. (I'm not one, but let's imagine I was.)
If you manage to end it in 3-8 seconds they can do 360 such calls in an hour. If the guy costs $12 per hour that works out to little over 3 cent.
And then, 20 months later a % of the "fuck off, leave me alone" guys need the product and remember how polite the call was. These usually do a good bit of research. They clearly call for information. If the price is good and they live 3 blocks away there are good odds they let you mow their lawn.
There is nothing super wrong with this, I mean, sales is necessary evil of doing business. necessary, because the whole point is to sell the thing, and evil, because you are coercing someone to do something they otherwise would not have done. But I think there is a healthy ratio here, and I try to make a point(often failing for the reason in the previous paragraph) to avoid products that lean too heavily on the unhealthy side of that ratio. those companies that believe sales is more important than the product.
If there are millions of prospects and you cant filter by anything the point is to figure out that they don't need or want your product. Do it fast and politely.
Or not even that, the actual goal is to put in the calls without the negative psychological effect of mass rejection.
Arguably, you can start calling before writing the business plan when you only have a half finished idea. If you find just one prospect who says your product would be a wonderful thing have them be more specific. Like that it is much easier to stay motivated. Rejection is much harder if you are deeply invested, wrote the plan, wrote the code, found investors, hired employees.
While cold calling is heavily associated with shit products that doesn't mean your product is shit the moment you pick up the phone. Or maybe it is and you need to be told what is wrong with it repeatedly. You need to be talking with people who've made widgets for decades, they know their stuff.
Who knows, maybe you don't even need an idea. If you just call 1000 people in the funeral sector they can tell you what software they need. Then try weddings, laundromats, plumbers etc
Ask the dumb questions, what would be the right time to call someone in the $sectorName sector? What is their software budget? What are the repetitive administrative tasks? Is the sector patient and polite or do they tell you to fuck off and hang up?
Customers often do not know that products or even product categories exist and need to be informed about them.
As an example, a pest control company canvassed one of my friends' cul-de-sacs and essentially threatened to send all the pests into his house by poisoning them and repelling them from all the neighbors. If you have a pest problem exclusion is usually cheaper and better than poison or repellent. My wife paid for trapping and control on her house for years and then I went around over the course of a couple of weeks and closed the gaps in her siding that were added by telecommunications companies like Verizon and AT&T and Comcast over the years. Mysteriously the pest problem went away after that.
So it's not always the case that the product being advertised is a net positive. Often it's net neutral or net negative. But the advertiser sure wants you to do it anyway.
I don't know how many times I have told my own mother not to pick up the phone. At best she knows at worst she says she's knows it's a scam but "just wants to see who it is". At least she knows not to press 1 although "why what would it do?" often comes up. She has no credit card or Internet so VISA and Amazon scams are obviously fake. Of the calls to her land line phone nearly 100% are scam calls.
Even my aunt who knows better called to ask my mother why [large company] needed her to get gift cards and not tell the police. The pressure of authority is strong for older people they can't fathom someone would dare impersonate police.
Don't fall for your elderly relatives behaviour if they seems smart and not in any way gullible they still may be. It's shocking how easily some people are fooled even ones you think would never fall for such scams.
In the era where calling someone on the phone is cheap and highly optimized, getting a phone call is not a signal for quality.
But back in the 1980s that wouldn’t have been the case. If a human being picked up the phone and called you, you would be more inclined to listen to them, simply because you knew it was expensive for them to call and it happened infrequently. Phone spam didn’t become a thing until much later.
When the cost is extremely low -- spamming -- any return at all will justify it.
When the cost is low and the return is relatively high -- cold calling -- it will happen.
Only regulation and good enforcement of the regulation can stop these activities in a capitalist regime.
BTW, I don't think you are immune. The only truly immune people are those that don't understand the language and/or have no money.
I have to disagree on that point. I have a no soliciting sign. It is an IQ test - I don't do business with people who can't or won't read the sign. I used to work in sales and had to deal with rejection enough that I have absolutely no problem asking people if they can read the sign and closing the door in their face if they start to argue that what they are doing isn't "soliciting" for some technical reason.
Hey, the rest of the thread is over here. It looks like you moved the goalposts so far away you might be lost.
If you're a game collector and I show up with a rare game, you're probably interested. Even if you don't buy it, at least I'm not wasting your time. If I show up with an Ethernet switch ASIC, you're probably not interested and I am wasting your time. That's why Marvell would cold-call Juniper and Cisco, not Antonio Romero Monteiro.
You know, I thought about this overnight. I'm pretty sure I feel this way partially because talking to people real time isn't free for me, it has a cost. I have to mask neurodivergence all day to get along in the corporate world, I do not want to put the mask on again unexpectedly when there's a knock at the door. It's my off time, it's like getting paged or something.
The second part is the privacy aspect, I don't want to do business in a power asymmetry -- they can reach me where I sleep but I cannot do the same to them. I don't want anyone I engage in a business relationship with to get any ideas of any type about who/what they see at my home, from judging negatively to jealously to planning to come back and take it. It's unnecessary risk surface for a business transaction.
But let's say you're a communist and I show up with a compound and a few followers, I suspect we have a deal to discuss regardless of the sign ;)
Also, the last time a doctors without borders person showed up, I tried pressuring her into joining a local protest a few days later until she got uncomfortable and decided to leave.
All types of forceful advertising – be that online ads or door-to-door salesmen – are absolute bullshit and shouldn't exist in a civilized society.
My doorbell is labeled "no soliciting" for a reason.
Want to donate to save this or that? No thank you
Want this super great deal on this awesome thing? No thank you
Want free money? No thank you
If I want something I’ll Google it and do some research and then just get that thing. I’m glad to overpay to do things my way. Nothing would change my mind. Ever.
Aging might.
My dad was like you.
Found out recently he has a girlfriend stuck in Nigeria that he was on his way to the bank to help.
On the internet we have - for it's faults - the DNS and X.509 certificate systems. When I go to my bank's website, I know it's my bank.
We desperately need telecommunications to implement the same thing - i.e. businesses must present a valid cryptographic certificate which ties back to their registration number when using the phone system.
At the very least, so someone claiming to be a business would have a clear "invalid certificate" message displayed on the receiver.
E.g., each call starts with an attempted modem conversation to validate certificates, keys, etc.
And then the call is forwarded to the recipient's actual phone depending on rules related to that first step.
Or more specifically, if you get a call and it's not from someone you know then you simply hang up. Relevant information comes from you seeking it out, not the other way around.
Drastic measures like this had to be taken because I had a DBA for awhile and foolishly listed my actual number with the business. Basically my number is forever 'on the list', so, I made my own list.
Of course, if you're on my list and you call asking for ten bucks, well, I'll probably give it to you.
Incorrect - I'm immune because I presume 100% of solicitations are scams and behave as such. I don't listen to solicitations from anyone. I will just hang up, end the conversation, walk away, or close the door.
Even if I did listen to a solicitation and I was interested in the product or giving to the cause I would never actually buy anything, remember, I am presuming Jenny is a scammer. Jenny isn't getting any money from me no matter what she's selling.
We had such a visit recently; we were so appalled at the very idea that DwB would stoop so low as to send door-to-door solicitors around the town, that we immediately assumed this person was scoping the block for a potential break-in. Because he asked about our neighbor and we accidentally let it slip that he's away, we put up a hidden surveillance camera[0] overlooking the stairway and both our doors' for a couple days, just in case someone decides to come back at night. We also immediately queried Doctors Without Borders about this, warning them about a potential crime done using their brand.
Imagine our surprise where Doctors Without Borders responded to confirm that the person who visited us was, in fact, legitimately soliciting donations for them, and that they actually do door-to-door. Something in me died that day.
--
[0] - We repurposed a nanny cam for this, where by "nanny cam" I mean Ubiquiti G4 Instant, because the only way you can get a baby camera these days that doesn't send videos of your kids to random third-party servers is by buying industrial surveillance hardware.
If everyone who was soliciting was like Doctors without Borders, there wouldn't be a problem. That's a worthy cause.
The problem is the scammers, not DWB. The fact that you think it's legitimate causes trying to get support that are the problem and not the scammers makes my head spin.
The most manipulated I've been in recent years is when I actually feel bad for the salesperson because their job sucks so much.
I wasn't very good at it, but some people did quite well out of it. Admittedly, only earning student-amounts. I don't think you could have fed a family on it.
Think YouTubers receiving sponsorship offers, journalists getting leads, recruiters getting candidates, VCs finding start-ups, and car dealers getting inventory.
These people are often quite receptive to cold calls & emails if you can demonstrate credibility.
Read a good sales book that talks about it.
There are a few factors: Effective salespeople will narrow down the list to cold call - so it's not completely random. Examples:
When trying to get a house for cheap, it's not hard to find a list of people in a locale who own more than 50% equity. Now it's a matter of cold calling and finding one who is in hard times and cannot sell (e.g. house is in poor enough condition that no bank will give out a mortgage). The home owners are at risk of defaulting, so you take the property off their hands for relatively cheap, fix it up, and sell it. This way the homeowners get money (as opposed to a foreclosure where they'd get nothing).
Roofs: A lot of new homes have a 20 year roof. Look up neighborhoods built in the last 20-30 years. Go door to door and try to sell them a new roof. Many will buy, because they know they have to replace it sooner or later.[1] You can also tell them which of their neighbors recently got a new roof.
Solar panels: Same idea: Find people with old roofs, and give them a "deal" for a new roof + solar panel combo. Getting that solar panel incentivizes them to change the roof.
Really, the key is to have a systematic way to reduce your search space. Then you'll get more successes.
[1] Pro tip: Never get your roof changed this way. I've actively gotten quotes for my roof, and the highest quote I got was cheaper than the lowest quote from the door to door salesmen.
For example, I worked with with the woman in charge of our modeling team. She had a big issue managing a growing, international workflow. They used spreadsheets when the team was smaller, but that solution didn't scale and was starting to show cracks. Her boss gave her significant budget to fix the problem, but she had no idea how to spend it. I told her that one call to a Jira sales rep (or equivalent) and all her problems would evaporate. One call could have potentially saved our firm tons of money and provided another firm with a very good, sticky customer. As far as I'm aware, she was so overworked as-is that she never reached out/researched it.
1. We used to do a lot more business over phone calls back in those days, so people were more willing to entertain cold phone calls
2. Technology has allowed automating phone call scams, so we get a lot more of those nowadays
3. Calling internationally is dirt cheap now, so you can have call centers full of scammers in cheap countries
4. Everyone is using text messaging with their friends and family so phone calls are more likely to be scams
After that point it required the invention of high speed internet and compression algorithms. Calling internationally over dedicated channels remained insanely expensive even after long distance mostly disappeared. Now the foreign call is handled via IP until it reaches the country of origin and is dumped into POTS via a local VOIP provider.
And it was awkward for me too, I don't even have a background in sales. I'm sure a talented salesperson could have done much better than me at retaining their attention after the first opening sentences.
It goes like this at trade shows too. I can find the available types of pizza by visiting any pizza shop, but to find the available types of 5G base station I'll probably have to attend Mobile World Congress, or they'll have to discover me (if I'm a more publicly visible and quite big company) and then call me.
Bring back Ma Bell. She wouldn't have put up with this crap.
Compared to online marketing? Or cold emailing? Or talking to random people in the street?
I can't actually imagine a more efficient way to get a significant nr of sales from strangers than cold calling personally.
Of course contacting people who already know you is better, but the problem for a business is that in most/all cases that list of people who know you is not long enough.
They claimed to have access to a block of NVidia stock available at a discount to the market price (I think it was around 10-15% off) and they needed investor funds immediately to buy the whole block. The minimum investment was $10k. When I sounded interested, my call was moved to a different young man who had a much more aggressive tone. That's where I hung up.
After the call, I remember thinking: "This is actually a good investment idea. I should buy some NVDA, but not from these weirdos in Hong Kong."
— Dear reader, did I buy the stock then? Of course not. Looks like NVDA is up about 260x since that call. (Insane. I had to double-check that.)
Imagine if someone actually sent $10k to this cold-calling Hong Kong company and just forgot about it. Now that $10k would be worth 2.6 million dollars. You see NVidia in the news and get excited about cashing out to buy a mansion... You call their phone in Hong Kong. "This number has been disconnected." No trace online of the investment advisor who got your $10k. That would sting far worse than just realizing early on that you'd been scammed.
Are you saying that now that BlackRock's CEO is endorsing it, El Savlador's president is buying it as reserve for the country and Trump promising to use Bitcoin as a strategic reserve, it could go 260x and that, hence, if we get such a scammy phone call we should hung up and open an account on Coinbase (a HN unicorn btw) to buy Bitcoins?
My father made a friend, an elderly man, who was being taken advantage of by some locals. Basically helping themselves to anything in his house, asking for cash, drives places, etc. And he was glad to give it because he had no one else in his life at the time. What's money with no one to share it with? Finally met my Dad, who, thankfully, got his friend to move out-of-state to live with his only surviving family before he passed
Obviously recruiting is a bit different, because of course I have to go interview at a place and whatnot, but it's the only example of where a cold call worked on me.
People are gullible and want to believe the best in others. Cynics don’t make good victims.
I'd like for you to meet my dad.
Out of curiosity, why?
It might be (probably is) my asocial personality and the fact that getting interrupted is very triggering for me.*
But while I am amenable to the argument that there is no use in being rude to someone who cold calls, I can't help but pick on your choice of words: "good to be polite to anyone"
Is it morally good to be polite to someone who wants to harm you? Perhaps if they are physically threatening you and politeness is part of your deescalation strategy. But a cold caller? I like to believe that there is a special rung of hell reserved for cold callers (right next to lawyers and people who talk at the theatre).
I don't go out of my way to be mean or nasty to them because there is nothing of value that can come from that.
But they certainly don't deserve a "please" in front of "delete this number click" in my personal opinion.
* - While I'm not a huge fan of smart phones, they do have one killer feature that has won me over: the ability to set the default ring tone to silence and assign people in my contacts a ring tone that will actually get my attention.
It's not. People who advocate for it here are cold callers themselves.
I do think it's good to be polite to anyone who calls, but it doesn't matter what they say or ask, the answer is always a polite "Please don't call me again."