Persistence Is Assured

A couple years ago, I got some car insurance quotes online. As usual, I received follow-up calls from most of those insurers trying to get me to actually purchase from them. I let them all go to voicemail since I didn’t want to deal with them, and they all gave up within a week.

All except one, that is. This guy called me every weekday and Saturday for six months and left a minute-long message every time. It clearly wasn’t a robo-call because the messages were not the same; the same basic spiel, but with enough changes in tempo and word choice that it had to be a human.

Yes, I could have answered him one time and just told him I wasn’t interested, but after a couple of weeks I was curious how long he would keep it up. I don’t know if this level of persistence was corporate policy, a manager’s instructions, or the salesman just not using his time wisely, but in any case, he wasted over two and a half hours of company time on a potential customer who clearly wasn’t going to respond positively.