At this time, I am endeavoring to use telesales to improve my visibility and reach some new clients. Every time I’ve done this in the past, I have within just a few days, built up so many searchers, browsers, clients and customers, that I had to abandon making the outgoing calls to deal with all the new clients and inquiries! I expect this will happen yet again.
When I was in Real Estate sales and wrote-up my own 4-page Newsletter and mailed it out to a couple of hundred income property owners and followed-up with phone calls, a gentleman out in the Richmond District, near the Cliff House called, and I visited his 3-story apartment house. He was getting tired of life in the City and wanted to trade-in his S.F. units and two single family houses to buy a motel we had for sale in South Lake Tahoe on Ski Run Boulevard — called The Elekai! The ‘deal’ we put together was concluded within 45 to 60 days, 3 properties were sold and that equity used in an exchange for The Elekai, and I got a check from the Title Company for more than $18,000! THAT was my reward for just ONE GOOD NEWSLETTER, and enough ambition and gumption to distribute it to a select group of potential clients.
Another time in my life, when I decided to try to help build-up business in a tiny little hole-in-the-wall occult store, I decided, “What if we call it the Psychic Centre? What if I bring some of my used, old books from home and put them up on shclves in the window to bring people in?” Then, I sat down with nothing but a White Pages Directory and started making phone calls! I made phone calls for two days, telling anyone I got hold of that we had some very good psychic ‘readers’ and astrologers at the Psychic Centre, and a selection of used and rare books, as well! One of the people I happened to call just happened to be a well-known ‘skeptic’ who customarily ‘put down’ psychics, etc., was puzzled at how I got his number. He couldn’t believe it was pure chance that I called him out of thin air, but that’s just how it happened! You get all kinds of interesting people when you try to speak with at least 100 people a day!
For 2 days I made calls from the store. Guess what? I couldn’t do any more calls on the third day. The store was filling-up with curious shoppers, drifting in to see who it was and why it was that someone called them at home to get them to stop by and visit this unusual place! Some got readings, some came back with their friends and waited for each other to get readings. Many browsed through the growing quantity of books that I kept bringing in every day, and for every $20 in readings, there was $20 to $30 in book sales! Within a week, I was made General Manager of this store. Within a year, I owned this store. Within another year and a half, I was not only paying $900 a month rent for the Psychic Centre in the East End, but also $2,500 a month for Books on Bloor, across from a Cineplex Odion theatre complex in the West End of town. The original store sold books and had all the psychics; the 2nd store was books and record albums only! I got a great circle of psychics, empaths and clairvoyants to help! They gladly came in at regular times to get ‘walk-ins’, or waited at home for me to call them to come in. England’s John Golsby, one of the area’s top clairvoyants, and very well known at Lilydale Spiritualist Retreat in uptstate New York, Claire Brickus, Chris “Christmas Angel” Henderson, Paulette Joseph, and myself and several others, filled out the “Seven Top Psychics — Doing All Kinds of Readings” motto for my store. We GUARANTEED SATISFACTION with all our readings… if someone wasn’t enjoying their reading up to maybe half way through, they were welcome to cancel, walk away, and pay nothing.
What was it that propelled this business success into motion? The WILLINGNESS I had to CALL STRANGERS ON THE PHONE. That’s what it was! I wasn’t ashamed to call, because I had a good product. I wasn’t selling carpet cleaning or student loan consolidations, I was offering people a chance to know more about themselves and others. I was offering something that appealed to both the intellect and the ‘soul’. Many of them appreciated my calls, many of them became clients. I am endeavoring to do the same exact thing now! But I know I won’t be calling for long, because, as I said, everytime I do this, business builds up to a frantic pace and right now, there’s just met to “cover!”. Semi-retired.., practically ‘home-bound’…, there is only so much one man can do! Let’s see what happens in the days and weeks to come! Thanks, —–Ed