I’m sorry but you’ll have to call our corporate offices. They handle those decisions. Works every time. 
I spent 8 months of my life as a food salesman and I can tell you the job is thankless and sucks… What is the reason that you do not want to entertain these requests for your time? Competition for my business saves me thousands of dollars a year in food cost… I will not post the name of my software company, because I now understand that the forum is about sharing from our shops experiences, but I developed it so I can get sales bids with little infringement on my time… I will only talk to any other salesman in my business if they are willing to do one of two things… Back up their product with money back guaranteed results or if they let me try it FREE with no payment method… Most say no which to me is an indication of a person only interested in benefitting their paycheck… This method guarantees no follow up visit btw…
I am going to share a really funny and true story, but this is not how to handle this situation… I worked for a guy in college thirty years ago that got so sick and tired of the video surveillance phone calls, he finally told them to send the rep… The rep set up the equipment and went through his pitch… My boss at the time, started talking to the rep about product durability in the restaurant environment, to which the rep replied his stuff was bulletproof… lolol… I then watched my boss pick the camera up of the tripod and throw it across the store, he knocked the DVR off the counter onto the floor and threw the monitor out the front door of the restaurant… He handed the rep a broom and said tell your people to stop calling… They never called again… True story… PS… Please don’t try this in your place of business!!! It’s a great story though lolol…
When they call on the phone and ask for owner or manager, we say sure hang on 1 second while i grab them
Place on hold and walk away. when they call back repeat.
I had a call the other day wanting to verify my listing information was correct. I asked where they got the information and was told it was from my web site. My response was, “then it must be correct. Have a nice day.”
good idea! these people call me like 5 times a day. its so annoying
I do the exact same thing!
I am going to try this…
We have many methods, and they are all a lot of fun.
- Put on hold and never come back. love it
- We put them in our customer database so when they call back they pop up as " do not answer", or “sales call " The other day I the caller ID name came up as " Just give up already”
- Just start taking an order from them. " What size would you like?" " Pick up or delivery?"
- If they ask me if I’m interested in saving money. I always reply with “No! I want to spend the most possible.”
- If they ask me if I want to increase sales. " NO, that would just be more work!"
My employees are all instructed to play dumb. They don’t even know who the owner is. This is their first day. We had to institute that policy when we would tell Yelp no and they would delete all of our good reviews.
Whats really cool is somewhere out there is a cold call message board ( Cold Call Quarterly) and they are all on there telling funny stories too.
I was at an ice cream shop yesterday and some salesman came in… the salesman said “I’m back again, did you think about it any?”, the owner says, “I don’t think we are interested right now”, the salesman says, “I’ll be back then, how about next week?”, the owner tells him, “how about I call you if I change my mind instead.”, the salesman says, “everyone says that, nobody ever does. I’ll check back in a few weeks.”
Now that I type it out it sounds like a shake down, but I swear it wasn’t. It was some guy trying to sell his floor cleaning services. It was such a shit way to do it too. I mean, who says something like that? “Oh you aren’t interested? I’ll be back in a few weeks. Maybe if I annoy you enough you will change your mind”… so sleazy. I was embarrassed just sitting there listening to this go down. I’ve seen the “annoy them so much they sing up” via telephone many times, but this was the first I’ve seen it face face.
Needless to say now I’m waiting to have this guy pay us a visit.