Thread by @ritholtz

Merrill Lynch is no longer training new brokers to Cold Call. This is long overdue . . .

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
1/

Little known fact:

Cold calling was extensively refined by a Managing Director of the investment banking firm Shearson Lehman Hutton (the predecessor to Lehman Brothers.

His name was Martin Shafiroff

ritholtz.com/2008/09/latest…

2/

Shafiroff refined various phone-selling techniques (straight line, the first trade, the trust close). These were published for the 1st time in “Successful Telephone Selling in the ’80s” and subsequent editions (’90s, etc.)

He opened Pandora's Box

amazon.com/exec/obidos/AS…
3/

Having worked on the sell-side for the first decade of my Wall Street career, I am intimately familiar with the various pitches the retail world uses to obtain clients and assets. Every single retail broker I knew had Shafiroff’s how-to on his bookshelf.

4/

My colleague Josh Brown (literally) wrote the book detailing these selling strategies how and how you can protect yourself against them

amazon.com/exec/obidos/AS…

5/

So the Cold Calling era is ending -- not because it is intrusive and annoying and a terrible way to make investment decisions -- but because no one answers phones calls from unrecognized numbers anymore

/END