Cold Calling in the 1980s

This shiny shoed salesman calls on a funeral director

Sometime in the early 1980s, I began a role as a brand new salesman at Tait Electronics in Crummer Rd. I’ve written before about how The Colonel explained to me what I had to do if I wanted to become a people leader.

I cut off my waist-length hair, trimmed my beard, bought myself a leather briefcase and a grey suit, and replaced my motorcycle boots with shiny black shoes, suitable for pounding the pavement because the path to most of my business was knocking on doors, cold calling. I wouldn’t say I was a dedicated follower of fashion.

Every door of every business that had company vehicles was a prospect. When I first started, they gave me a small number of existing clients and looking after them was easy. Getting new business was different. We did next to nothing in the way of advertising and cold calling was our main way of getting business other than referrals.

This was a time before we had mobile phones, so the 2-way-radio aka RT was the way that people used to communicate when a POTS phone wouldn’t do the job.

RTs had been around for years. All the taxis had them. Large trucking firms, construction companies, and couriers were all covered, and it wasn’t easy to find new business.

We used to have brainstorming sessions in the sales office on how to win new business, and as a problem solver, I loved those meetings, but being green, I wasn’t given much credibility by the rest of the team who had been in sales long before they joined the company.

We had to discover problems that business managers weren’t considering and learn enough about their operations, to solve those problems with a compelling ROI justification. They weren’t looking for a solution to their problems in telecommunications technology.

Cold calling basically consisted of walking along a street (I highlighted them in my map book with a highlighter as I visited each street).

First I would look to see if a business had any vehicles parked outside, perhaps sign-written.

Then I would go up the steps and into the reception area to be faced with a woman or girl whose job was to provide a barrier between the manager and door-to-door reps. I would need to get that person to talk to me, with words other than, “sorry he’s busy”, or “My boss doesn’t see salespeople, sorry.” If you could win over the sentry, you had a chance.

It was stressful in the beginning. I remember being on Mt Eden Rd and getting so many rejections that I wasn’t sure I could face any more. My next prospective target was an impressive office building for a large company, and I walked up the steps to the front door, hesitated, and stepped back down to the street. I looked around, making out that I had just remembered something. Not that anyone was watching, or cared.

Sometimes I did that 2 or 3 times, not wanting to miss an opportunity and not wanting another no, up to the front door and back down to the street. I remembered my training from SMEI at AUT. ‘Each no is s stepping stone to yes’. I learned how to calculate my strike rate and welcome the rejections.

This photo is historical, and it looked smarter than this when I knocked on their door. Today the facade is all gone and the building looks bland. The company is also gone.

I arrived at WH Tongue and Son, walked upstairs to reception and asked for the name of the Manager.

“Sorry, he doesn’t see sales reps.”

Here we go again!

“OK, can you give me his name, so that I can call him and make an appointment?”

“It would be a waste of time, I told you, he doesn’t see reps.”

About this time a man in a dour dark pinstriped suit walked into reception from an office and asked what was going on. The receptionist started to explain that I was just leaving. He interrupted and asked why I was there. I explained that I wanted to see the manager, learn a little about his business and see if there was a need for communication with people in the field.

Keith had a grin on his face, invited me into the office, got the receptionist to make us a coffee (I tried not to smile at a little win), and sat me down in a leather chair in front of his desk.

“Why would I need a radiotelephone?” Leaning back in his chair behind the desk. “We are a pretty simple business. People die. Someone calls us on the phone, we go and visit, and we provide a service. It’s been working fine for a hundred years.”

I asked him to explain a bit more, and he happily told me how his business worked, cracking some black humour jokes, which broke the ice, but also made me wonder about his professional veneer. But all good. I would learn that he was a little eccentric, but also highly respected.

I said, “Thanks so much for explaining how your business operates. Can I take that back to my office and have a think about it, and then come back to you with some ideas?”

“Don’t come back unless you have a great proposition for me, and I doubt you’ll do that.”

I took his business card down to my company Holden Torana, wondering how I was going to solve the problem and went on to the next door after putting my notes in my daily call sheet with the initials CC for Cold Call.

I took the situation to my next sales meeting and did a role play with the team. I hated role plays, they were often more intimidating than the real thing. But it was a safe way to brainstorm. I was given loads of objections by the team and Paul Monk, the Sales Manager. I had some ideas, but I didn’t know if they would work.

I rang and made an appointment with the receptionist to see Mr Tongue. Her tone suggested she was thinking, “Not you again!”

I arrived, wearing my Pierre Cardin business shirt, neatly adjusted tie, and my tidy grey suit. The only one I owned. I was invited back into Keith’s office. No coffee and something along the lines of “This had better be good, son, I’m a busy man.”

I asked him to run me through a typical day, and remembered from my training and Zig Ziglar tapes, that people liked talking about themselves. How to get what you want, by giving other people what they want. I can still hear Ziglar’s drawl today.

Keith walked me through some things I needed to know, and some I didn’t need to know, like a visit to the embalming room. The black humour continued, as he explained that you need a bit of that to survive in his profession.

We went through the visit to the deceased’s home, the preparation, the hearse and trip to the service, and even the music that played at the service.

He came to the end of the tour and presentation with “So you see, we have it down to a fine art. We don’t need your product, but it was nice to see you again.”

I asked a few questions, like, “What if someone wanted to see you, while you were visiting a bereaved family and could have made another call while you were out, instead of having to go back to the office and go out again?”

“Our business is never in that much of a hurry.”

Then suddenly, I had a brainwave. “Have you ever had a hearse break down, while it was on the job?”

He paused and grimaced. “Funny you should ask that. Last week one of my people was on their way from the service, leading a large procession to the cemetery. There must have been more than 20 cars following, all with their lights on. The hearse broke down. They couldn’t get it started again.

There they were on a busy suburban street in Avondale, with a cortege all stopped, the mourners wondering what was going on.

The driver had to go up to a house and ask if he could use their phone to call the office and get a replacement hearse sent out to continue to the burial. It was highly embarrassing and not great for our reputation.”

YES! I had the problem, that would win me the sale. I explained how with a two-way radio, the driver could have called for help and things would have been solved more quickly and discretely.

He wasn’t 100% convinced, but I was. I offered him a free trial, which would be on our private channel at Taits. The trial would be for 4 weeks and if he didn’t feel it had been beneficial, we would uninstall them and there would be no charge.

What an interesting four weeks it was. The chatter coming across our channel was interesting and colourful, to say the least. Clearly, the dry sense of humour didn’t just emanate from the corner office. We heard things that should not have been shared on a two-way radio when other people, our staff, and others on trials should have. I had to make an urgent phone call to explain to them how it worked, that other people could hear them, and ask them to keep it businesslike.

In fact, we ended up having to change them to a different model of radio, a new system we were launching, where as long as people kept the microphone on its holder, people would only hear communications from their own company, even though they were on the same channel. Of course, some people didn’t do that, because they were fascinated by some of the comms on offer.

A couple of weeks went by and I rang Keith to see how he felt the trial was going. It was working fine and they had a little benefit from it, but not a lot. He said that often when calls from the field did come through to their base station, there was nobody in the office to take the call. The people working in the evenings and weekends were typically in the embalming room.

The base station had a cable going to a Yagi antenna on the roof, so they couldn’t just move it. Fortunately, we had recently released powerful handheld radios that operated on the same UHF frequencies, so I arranged to lend him a couple of them.

A few days later, my boss came to see me and said, “You have to get those people off our channel! The things they are saying, should not be heard by anyone outside of that room and now they have somehow jammed the radio so that it is transmitting constantly. We can hear everything that is being said in their office. I had the frequency on my radio and had a listen. I have no idea what they were doing, but it was something that shouldn’t be shared.”

I had to contact Keith and get them to turn off the press-to-talk button and tell my not yet a paying customer, that if he couldn’t control his people, we would have to abandon the trial. Not a great start to trying to win over a customer.

Why did it matter? Keith was a well-respected leader in the funeral director community and a senior member of their industry association. I needed his business as a lever to sell to the other funeral directors in Auckland.

Anyway, I got the business, the industry none of my colleagues had been able to conquer, and enjoyed friendly visits with him as a customer. I was drawn to his intelligence and sharp wit.

I have many stories of my days at Taits, so if you are interested in hearing more of them, hit the subscribe button.

Does this bring back memories of your own? Feel free to leave a comment.