it’s 9 a.m. and i’m sitting in a windowless classroom filled with former and present alcoholics/drugs addicts, struggling musicians/actors/writers and a few black guys. aaron begins our training by having us fill out and sign the company’s employee paperwork. one of the documents that we must sign and initial states we forfeit all salary bonuses that we have accrued if we miss more than 4 days of work per six-month period.

looks like i’ll never be seeing my bonuses. damn it.

we are given white 3-ringed notebooks with sample telephone scripts and copies of the five basic products that we will be selling. we are told that the scripts are more important than the contacts. we are selling the scripts and ourselves. the actual products and price don’t make.

this strikes me as odd/wrong and completely counter-intuitive to how a good and reputable product would be distributed and sold to the general population. but i’m broke and need to make rent. i keep my mouth shut and take notes as aaron walks us through the scripts.

aaron introduces us to basic sales tools that we are to use to make sales. these include:

- using command language to ensure that we maintain a high social value, do not use weak language or ask weak questions, or give the customer any respect whatsoever (they must earn it). we are told several times that the customers we are calling are “morons,” “stupid” and “complete piles of garbage.”

- mirroring the customer, as in their tone, pace, vocabulary intelligence level. if we can we are encouraged to take on their regional accent, marital status and have or not have children to mimic their parental situation. we are told that it’s okay to play characters, change our sex and/or race on the phone if necessary.  we are also encourage to use phone names and not to use our actual names under any circumstances. aaron favors using the names of obscure collegiate and professional athletes.

- creating common ground by spending the first 1 to 2 minutes on the line with customer making them like and trust us. we are told to use any and all info we have to manipulate the conversation into an immediate friendship. stereotyping is mentioned and encouraged. we are told to pretend were are detectives and to use any background noise to give us clues about the person’s living situation, possible relationships and children or pets.

- creating urgency is the most important thing during a call. we need to make the customer think that whatever product is they have that they are just outside of the timeline where we can help them out. then we are told to use the common ground we created to convince them that we are going to cut them a one-time deal that is exclusively just for them. this is where we manipulate the product price to reflect to what we think is the maximum price we think they will pay based on our observations regarding ages, sex, location, probable income and intelligence level.

we spend the rest of the morning and early afternoon discussing and repeatedly going over these tactics and strategies.

then we are excused and everyone goes home.