Telemarketers will (eventually) leave you alone if you never give out your email.
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| (photo: Bart) |
Saltydroid states that there is a band of Internet Marketers who have banded together in something called The Syndicate - which they claim is more of a trade union. (The idea is that they organize between themselves to make sure they mail to each other's launches and coordinate. They also share price points and other data.)
Now saltydroid says on his site that Mike Filsaime is part of this Syndicate and has several articles on him.
What's more interesting is that saltydroid has a recorded interview with Filsaime - and it's all about his use of boiler-rooms (telemarketers) to sell his products. (That interview is here.)
The trick with telemarketers is that they sell their lists to each other, if they are unethical - which most are. Now the links I gave you earlier actually tell the story of how telemarketers work.
While the really interesting stuff is in Internet Scam Capitol USA, and the very dry edition is in Scammer Jammer. (As well as in it's younger brother, Get Your Self Scam Free.)
The main point of this is to say that if you don't accept telemarketer calls, and you watch what you are opting-into - then you can avoid a great deal of pain and annoyance on your lines. (Again, see those books above for more details on how to do that.)
Mike Filsaime Verifies Telemarketers Suck
In this phone interview, saltydroid gets some great data about how screwed up the various telemarketing scene can get. Filsaime actually tried to make his own, but it was a complete nightmare for him.He verifies the pricing that Scam Capitol USA described:
- You already know that it’s built roughly on 10%’s - the Fulfillment Centers (Thrive Learning Institute, formerly Bright Builders) gets 10% to coach their clients.
- Sales Floors only make about 10% profit off each sale. (out of the 55% they take)
- 10% go into refunds with the balance going into operating costs.
- The sales person gets about 10-20% or so as commission.
- Credit Card companies extract their 10% of the take. (From the Sales Floors.)
- And the Lead Providers do something with their 35%
That last line is key. If you are providing leads to these sales floors/telemarketers/boiler-rooms, you then get 35% of the take.
For Filsaime, he was promoting Prosper, who started out with $2500 packages for phone coaching. So he was getting $875 for every person who signs up. (The trick is that Filsaime already sold some product to that person, based somewhat on Prosper's training, and then shared the email address with Prosper. Anything he gets from them is just extra cash - he doesn't have to deliver any goods to the customer or do fulfillment at all for anything Prosper sells them. Nice work.)
Thrive Learning was caught in their mess of being an independent with their fulfillment. That chapter in Scam Capitol laid out exactly why they failed. They had no real control over the independent boiler-rooms/sales floors - but were nailed for not fulfilling the promises. Sales floors would come and go. But Thrive was supposedly there for the long haul. Eventually, it got to be more costly than it was worth. (And in a little over a year, they were busted by the government, and in 5 years, they were completely gone.)
Note: Prosper is arguably one of the still-standing "decent" places which do telemarketing, because their sales and fulfillment are all in-house This means they can actually be regulated by the government. The indies are simply fined and forced out of business after wrecking lots of people's lives.
Now here's that link again, so you can hear Mike Filsaime talk about how weird and crazy the telemarketers are. Go ahead and get the books linked above for yourself for your own education.
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