Cold Callers at Brokerages Gear Pitches for Men Only

“If your wife is like my wife, she’s probably more interested in spending money than making it. I’ll have my wife call your wife and they can talk about shopping. Let’s you and I talk about serious investing.”

Thus goes part of the carefully scripted pitch to “Mr. Jones” by a cold caller--the voice on the other end of the phone trying to sell you a favorite stock because you’re “so successful.”

Cold callers at brokerages, mostly novice salesmen in their 20s, make hundreds of calls a day to targets drawn from lists of professionals or known investors in the hopes of netting a handful.

It’s a tough business, and some say young brokers (and their firms) make it tougher on themselves by almost ignoring more than 40% of potential investors--the Ms. or Mrs. Jones on potential sales lists.

Brokers tend to be uninterested in talking to women. Richard L. Berman, a Rockville, Md., consultant who’s been plagued by phone pitches, said callers hang up or won’t leave a message when the woman of the house answers. “They figure if they’ve got a man’s name, he’s the guy who makes the financial decisions,” he said.

It’s not that women aren’t in the stock market. Forty percent of investment clubs now are all-female, according to the National Assn. of Investors Corp., which represents more than 100,000 individual investors and investment clubs.

“We never call girls,” admitted a 25-year-old cold caller with two years of experience, adding that his firm’s veterans “tell you not to bother.”

Cold callers give women short shrift because their scripts are tailored to men--and play to men’s weak spots: their supposed sense of independence, their masculinity, their pride.

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Three scripts obtained by Bloomberg Business News embody an old boys, clubby sort of tone. The pitches are all directed to “Mr.”

Tell the cold caller you’re a little short of cash right now and he responds:

“Mr. Jones, I can certainly relate to that. My wife keeps telling me ‘I’m not overdrawn, you’re under-deposited!’ ”

Tell him you’d rather wait a day:

“When you asked your wife to marry you, did she say, ‘I’ll call you back,’ or ‘I’ll call you next week?’ Of course not. She recognized an opportunity.”

Tell him you’re concerned about the risk factor of some hot new technology stock:

“You couldn’t have these kinds of rewards without some form of risk. No guts, no glory!”

Some scripted sales pitches go far enough to draw complaints to state securities regulators. “It’s like out of ‘Father Knows Best’ or something,” said Philip Feigan, Colorado’s state securities regulator. “I have certainly heard and seen scripts with, ‘Who wears the pants?’ ”

Some young cold callers insist that women aren’t overlooked. At his firm, one 24-year-old broker said, “the girl stockbrokers call the girls.” Like others, he declined to have his name or firm used in this article.

To be sure, there’s no law stating that men and women must have an equal opportunity to be subjected to the worst offerings of cold callers or “churn-and-burn” tactics that emphasize quick one-shot sales.

Indeed, most complaints about cold callers, penny-stock offerings or other underhanded stock dealings come from men, said Deborah Bortner, a securities director for Washington state’s division of financial institutions.

Cold callers have “discovered what works on men,” Bortner said. “It’s going to sound stereotypical, but I think that men are slightly more suggestible.”

For many young cold callers, the hard sell is all they know.

“My whole pitch is they have to work with me, immediately, and why they don’t have time to go talk with their wife,” said one Long Island, N.Y., broker who started in the business while still in college.

His rebuttals to potential objections from would-be customers come quickly, like rote quotes from a nursery rhyme:

“You run a multimillion-dollar company, and I know you make a million decisions every day without your wife. When she uses your credit card, she doesn’t ask you for permission, am I right? When you get a flat, who gets out and changes the tire, you or your wife?”

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Another broker said he knows to push harder when the guy on the other end of the phone even brings up consulting a spouse: “When he says he has to talk to his wife, you know that it’s not a real rebuttal.”

Some cold callers defend phone sales pitches as a legitimate tool to attract new clients they hope will remain loyal for years. “One, I don’t try to manipulate people and intimidate them, and two, it’s a bad way to do business,” said John Preston, a Wheat First Butcher Singer broker who started at Dean Witter in 1983 as many colleagues did: cold calling.

“I’d rather have a 30-year relationship with a guy than question his manhood,” Preston said.

Preston knows what it feels like. He has often been phoned by cold callers trying the masculinity trip on him. And while he’s seen many coercive scripts, said Preston, not every broker resorts to those gimmicks.

“I think you have a two-tiered population,” he said. “Once you put pressure on someone where you say you’ve got to do this today, you fall into the field of the disreputable company.”