Wow, this is really embarrassing. This is a story just for you. I don't tell my live audiences this not sure I've ever told anyone other than a close friend this but my first professional speaking job of sorts, was in a boiler room operation. I was 18 years old had just graduated from high school. I was in Charlotte, North Carolina. And this was a summer job before I went into college.
It was a boiler room selling timeshare condominiums. So my job was to call people up and say congratulations, you may have on either a brand new television, a vacation to some exotic place or a quarter carat diamond. Now, as far as I know, I didn't break any laws. And if I did the statute of limitations as long passed since this was 1981 When this occurred, the, I guess scammy part of it was everyone got the quarter carat diamond and a quarter carat diamond of this quality cost about 50 cents or $1. The whole idea was to get people to come pick up their prize and hear a sales pitch to go buy a timeshare. A couple of lessons I learned from this.
Number one, cold calling can work. If you just make enough calls. a certain percentage of people will say yes, and it may be far less than 1%. If you keep your costs low enough, it doesn't matter of those people who show up for a sales pitch. a certain percentage will buy. So that is one lesson.
Just cold calling does work. We were going through the phone book for certain fluent zip codes. That was it. The second big lesson is cold calling is a horrible existence. It's so boring. It's so you feel dirty, almost interrupting people dinner time.
It's obnoxious, feels obnoxious. So if you're going to be giving presentations for a living, I do not recommend giving presentations over the phone. pitching. It's simply not enjoyable. I understand some people have to do it. It's the only job they can get.
But it shouldn't be anyone's first choice. It's simply not fun. And the final big lesson is it's so much easier to give presentations to people who actually want to hear your presentation. This is easy for me right now because you wouldn't be here if you hadn't actively typed in presentation skills and found this course and then actively click to enroll, and then actively pulled out your credit card or some other form of payment and bought the course. So you want to be here. So it's much easier for me to do this.
I know I have kind of a warm, friendly audience and in fact, your comments are overwhelmingly positive and abusive, and I appreciate that. So that's the real lesson. Don't be knocking heads and butting and trying to push messages these days. Have good messages, give your presentation and try to do it in a way where people want your messages you'll be much more effective. You'll enjoy it a lot more to