>

Scammers unable to pretend to be selling something would just pretend something else - to be your bank, the local government, a family member etc. Selling fake stuff by pretending to be a telemarketer is more complicated than just pretending to be someone's bank.
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Scams and fraud should be banned, and in many cases are, but telemarketing is obviously effective. If it wasn't, it wouldn't be done. Keep in mind that a lot of legitimate telemarketing is done through leads, meaning someone indicates that they're interested in the product or service before even being called. >


telemarketing is obviously effective. If it wasn't, it wouldn't be done.

But who is it effective on? The tactics involved in phone sales are often manipulative and predatory, even if the business is a legitimate one. How many telemarketing customers could more accurately be described as victims - senile or otherwise impaired individuals who are easily confused and might not understand what exactly it is they're signing up for or how much it's going to cost them? It's certainly not all people who order things being sold to them over the phone, but I guarantee it's not an insignificant number. >

The same could be said of any advertising. >

I'm not convinced. A prerecorded message on a screen or printed on a billboard isn't the same as a live operator; people respond to them differently. While there might still be small populations that are particularly vulnerable to other forms of advertising, a telemarketer who can adjust their tactics in real time is far more likely to work on people who aren't as "far gone." >

Telemarketers don't adjust their tactics: they read off scripts intended, like ads, to maximize their chances of making a sale. >

Some of those scripts are flowcharts and their response will vary based on what the prospective customer is saying. But regardless people still respond differently to live human voices than they do to recorded messages. >

I make cold calls, B2B.
Last year in 2022 I made ~20,000+ phone calls.
Out of that, I set up ~200+ meetings.
(About 1 in 100 we’d get somewhere)
From there I had 14 contracts signed.
Average contract-size was $7-8k/month.
We added ~$90k in MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue)
Each contract is typically a 3-year contract.
So we brought in $3M+ in revenue.
Nobody has to like telemarketing. (I don’t)
But it does work.
With my salary ($85k/year + commissions) the company essentially paid me $4 for every phone-call I made. ($326/day for 80 phone “dials” = $4 a ring 📞)
With the revenue we signed: $90k/recurring monthly, or $1M annually ($3M+ when you factor in our 3-year contract terms),
The company made $150+/revenue everytime I picked up a phone. (Regardless of whether or not anyone answered that particular call!)
I hope this was informative for you.
Unfortunately for you, telemarketing isn’t going anywhere for the foreseeable future IMO. The cost/reward ratio says to keep doing it.
AMA as I’d love to answer any further questions! >

As impressive as this is, and clearly it’s ROI positive for you and your employer, this is not a net positive to society. You made 20,000 calls last year and only 200 lead to meetings. 
This means you wasted the time of 19,800 people. Likely busy people working at their jobs. I may have been one of those people. I run a small business and get multiple calls every single day. Our business phone number routes to my personal phone so I don’t need an extra phone. The calls from telemarketers are interruptive and annoying and cost me time. 
You are wasting the time and annoying 19,800 people each year. I understand why you and your employer do this. But it’s not a good thing for society as a whole and the world would be much better off if the practice was banned. >

Definitely understand where you’re coming from.
It is “interruptive” and “annoying”.
But I have seen, firsthand, the impact my company has on our clients.
After onboarding certain clients, we directly enabled them to scale up their businesses. Creating new jobs in our city.
When COVID-19 happened and cybersecurity attacks went up two and a half times the usual rate, we kept 100% of our  clients’ businesses secured. This saves jobs.
Of the 20k dials I made. I spoke to 2k actual people. I always took “No” for an answer and moved on.
If you were one of the people that ended up on my list, I wasted, at most, a few minutes of your whole year.
But I don’t believe it’s fair to say there is no “net-positive” on society. >

Love the jump from "telemarketing is profitable for the telemarketing company" to "telemarketing saves jobs." Cmon, man. >

You dummy. Sales saves jobs. On both ends of the equation. 
At the company the person is selling for, there's more food on the table. Sure, you could say some of it gets disproportionately allocated to the owners, but that's a different story. Those orders secured by the salesperson allow the "regular people" to get paid. 
And on the receiving end of the sales phone call, there's now a company with a problem fixed / a risk averted --> jobs gained because they can scale up / don't have to downsize. 
Is this really so difficult to understand? >

Unsolicited marketing should be banned across the board. Unless you're consuming ad supported media you should have to an implied right to privacy. Direct mail at home, telemarketing? Gone. >

I still don't get why there's no modern equivalent of white pages. Where can I go to purposefully sign up for targeted advertising? Why can't I get marketing help when I am seeking for a solution? Why am I slammed with random/"related" stuff but when I seek something new I have to be the one to search for it?
I definitely don't want to get phone calls from people who think I'm prepared to buy what they are selling. I don't buy things like that and I hope almost nobody else buys things in that way. >

When I’m building out systems/processes for a business like a real estate brokerage, or a real estate team, a telemarketer is definitely needed, and it is definitely not “ineffective”. 
Telemarketer is also the traditional term for ISA in this regard, often times an ISA will mostly deal with prospects who are not cold calls aside from something like an expired listings sheet. 
You seem to view telemarketing strictly through the lens of something traditional like cold calling someone to sell them a vacuum. Telemarketers (or ISAs) are often calling people who have already provided their information and are waiting for a call. 
So I don’t think your problem is with telemarketers/ISAs here, I think your problem is more so with cold calling. I’ll give you an example of how cold calling is effective for a business and also helpful to the consumer in this industry.
Often times an agent will do jack shit to help someone sell their home. This can cause large amounts of stress and anxiety for the home seller. Eventually a listing that never sells will expire, and a telemarketer can call the numbers of people who had their listing expire and point them in a better direction so that they can get their home sold and move on with their life. 
If it wasn’t for cold calling here, one would have to set up campaigns to attempt to target everyone who has had a listing expire and hope it reaches their door/phone within a few days. While this could be effective, it’s not as good as picking up the phone and calling directly, hence the telemarketer. >

Cold calling. That makes sense. It does really annoy me when someone just calls me middle of my work day and sells stuff I have no interest in. But your examples of the positive use or telemarketing and cold calls are illuminating. Have a delta. !delta >

Confirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Cor_ay (2∆).
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OP a lot more people trust phones over online, there are things that may only receive sales success, or the majority of sales success through the phone method.
If it wasn't still a very successful tactic it would have died of when smartphones took off in 2004 and onward, and double so when access to the internet started removing the barrier to entry at around the same time.
It's still around because it's still a viable alternative method, while the internet ads have become so saturated, and burned so many people in such short time, that many ad platforms don't even make money and are loss leaders. >

You can tell the US military doesn't care about the average citizen because they've never glassed one of those foreign car warranty scam call centers. Why do I even pay taxes? >

I'll go you one further:  Any advertising that goes beyond just a factual description of the product benefits should be illegal.  Appeals to emotion are subconscious and therefore manipulative, dangerous, and break the Kantian deontological imperative to treat people as an end unto themselves rather than a means to an end. >

Oh please, you're talking Star Trek and we've still not stopped living in caves and lighting fires for fun. As much as I'd love to jump straight to doing that... I just don't think we'll be able to achieve it. >

I'm very glad that you understand that my North Star IS Star Trek. Star Trek is a documentary of an alternate future timeline we will never get to >

Holodeck-based advertising would be just one safety protocol away from becoming an involuntary suicide booth
Star Trek taught us responsible holodeck usage. Except we could never accept those constantly failing safety protocols!
I am particularly fond of Captain Picard's rosy viewpoint of the Federation. >

Scamming is already illegal, yet scammers still do it. So I’m not sure how making telemarketing illegal would help, as scammers would just keep doing it. >

My argument is that banning telemarketing - a marketing format that is already a nuisance to people - would limit the opportunities of scammers. >

Scammers usually aren't selling anything anyways. 
"Send me $1000 in Google play cards or you'll go to jail for tax evasion"
We need to educate people and improve caller id tech as someone else said >

That is a good point. Scaring people by authorities might actually be a more common tactic to scam people than just selling a fluke thing, as scare adds urgency. 
Latter is not non-existent though. For example, my grandparents were scammed into an endless subscription of overpriced socks that they could not cancel by any normal means, and the scammer demanded them to pay anyway. Police was needed to get the scammer to back off. 
But yeah, that is a good argument, making my Argument 2 losing much of its effect. Banning telemarketing would be "hitting a fly with a sledgehammer" solution. Have a delta.
!delta >

Confirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/SlothFF (1∆).
^Delta System Explained ^| ^Deltaboards >

Telemarketing already is mostly banned in the US. The Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) prohibits the use of any “automatic telephone dialing system" and prohibits any recordings or artificial voices. Any calls must be between 8 am and 9 pm, and callers must respect “do not call” requests (among some other restrictions). 
The biggest problem with telemarketing is not legitimate businesses that follow these rules (although they can be annoying too). The problem is scammers who ignore the law and can’t be traced. But passing more laws isn’t going to help to address that. >

If it's not relevant then why would it need to be banned? Surely money is being spent on it because it yeilds some results.
Even without telemarketing being common scammers will still take advantage of people via phones. What's needed is better caller ID tech to prevent spoofing and fakery. >

That is what confuses me. How effective is telemarketing, anyway? Now when I think of it, I should try to find statistics.
I feel like that if telemarketing was banned, it would give scammer more limited space to operate. Someone tries to get you make a subscription? If it's illegal, you just say no. Though there is a difference between telemarketing and making an agreement over phone, that's probably something that scammers might try to abuse.