Annoying Pest Or Welcome Guest? The Do Not Call List

Cold prospecting is like coal mining. It’s dirty, filthy, ugly, smelly, sweaty work best left to people who earn minimum wage with brawn, not maximum wage with brain. --- Dan Kennedy, Magnetic Marketing

There's lots of talk about the new National Do Not Call List (DNC) in Canada. As a consumer, you're probably happy. What about advisors trying to make a living? Some are concerned. Others aren't. 

Annoying Pest

You don't want to ignore a phone call at night because it could be important. We'd get calls from fax machines calling our fax machine. We didn't have one. So they'd call back again and again thinking our machine ran out of paper.  

Office fax machines still spew garbage faxes. You pay for the paper and ink. How annoying. There was no easy way to opt out until now. On a random day, I saw 27 wasted pages.

Email spam is annoying but it's easier to filter out --- 33 messages correctly tagged today. 

Telemarketing is the second worst pest. Calls at inconvenient times. Products and services you don't want or need.

Those days are now gone (with some exceptions).

The Most Annoying Remains

There's no relief for the most annoying pest: door-to-door solicitors. Two cute kids rang our doorbell and asked us to buy popcorn to support a cause we never hear about. I took the catalog. How can you refuse? The prices were $45-$55 on the open page. Yikes! Saying no then became easy.

Welcome Guest

You can easily joing the National Do Not Call registry. Online, you enter your phone number and confirm you're a human by typing an onscreen code. Here's the surprise. You don't even need to prove the phone number is yours. If you're not getting enough telemarketing, maybe someone opted you out. An act of random kindness. 

Unintended Side Effects

Before you choose your wish
You better think first.
With every wish there comes a curse.
--- Bruce Springsteen, With Every Wish

Old techniques like cold calling may be dead. Advisors are generally told that they cannot call on behalf of a company and if they do, they'll pay the entire fine of $16,500 per incident. Ouch! 

Suppose you're my advisor and I give you a referral. If you phone, you're telemarketing and you don't have permission. I'd have to call on your behalf or you could send them a letter. 

Businesses seek ways to encourage you to contact them. We're already smothered by advertising but expect more. From those willing to spend. 

Links

• National Do Not Call Registry (official site)
  
• Canadian Do Not Call List (Wikipedia)
• Fax Marketing: 27 pages of garbage
  
• Direct Marketing prices (dmworks.ca from Pitney Bowes)

Losing Your Livelihood: Insuring Against The Risk

But there's things that'll knock you down you don't even see coming. And send you crawling like a baby back home. --- Bruce Springsteen - When You're Alone

Insurance reduces risk and provides peace of mind. We insure our lives, our cars, our homes. What about insuring our livelihood/income/job? Companies disappear and you could be in the wrong spot. What can you do? You can make yourself more employable by improving yourself. This doesn't guarantee success but certainly improves the probabilities.

In the Harvard Business Review, Janet Banks and Diane Coutu write about How To Protect Your Job In A Recession (September 2008). They have three recommendations

1. Act like a survivor
2. Give your leaders hope
3. Be a team player

Act Like A Survivor

Over the years, I had staff seeking promotions or raises because they wanted more money. Or thought they did great work. Or thought they were indispensable. Those aren't good reasons. To earn more, do more than you're paid for. This applies whether times are good or bad.

Since we see better than we think, impressions can mean more than facts. If we act like winners, we get seen as winners and can become winners. Acting like a survivor helps you survive and become a survivor. Overcoming impressions takes time, during which we can improve our skills.

The Best Tactic

Survivors look forward to the future. The best way is by focusing on your customers, anticipating their needs and then satisfying them. Your customers can be inside or outside your organization. By proving your worth, you build your future at your company --- or another.

When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves. --- Viktor Frankl

How versatile are you? If you've built and maintained portable skills, you're valuable wherever you go. You might even find the courage or opportunity to do something fresh and more rewarding. For years, I developed/launched/marketed life and health insurance products. After "harmonization" into our much larger parent company in 2005, my role became redundant. Although I had no experience outside the "ivory tower", I eagerly switched to working with advisors and clients in the field. This new role is much more satisfying because I'm helping people directly and quickly. 

Give Your Leaders Hope

"The better your relationship with your manager, the less likely you are to be cut, all things being equal. Your ability to empathize can demonstrate a maturity that is invaluable to the company, not least because it models good behavior for others." --- Harvard Business Review, Sept 2008

How true. Leaders are people too. Chopping staff is not easy. As a head office actuary, I had to cut five from my team of ten during integration with the parent. Fortunately, their strong skills helped them land new positions.

Be A Team Player

"While everyone prefers working with a personable superstar to an incompetent jerk, when people need help getting a job done, they'll choose a congenial colleague over one who is more capable but less lovable." --- Sousa Lobo, Harvard Business Review

Likable trumps capable? That's tough to accept. But true. I learned this at The University of Western Ontario in 1984. Of the seventeen graduates in actuarial science, only four of us got job offers. What a shock since grads usually got multiple job offers. Three of us were the top students and got the best offers. The fourth was average but the most likable, which grads with higher grades found "unfair". 

I just checked the actuarial directory and don't see #4 listed. He probably failed the exams that lead to an actuarial designation and quit. Being capable also matters.

Links

• How To Protect Your Job In A Recession (Harvard Business Review, Sept 2008, pg 113)
  
• Interview with co-author Diane Coutu (Harvard Ideacast 110)
• The Four Habits of Highly Referrable People