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If you are anything like me, you get several sales pitches a day, including one or two requests from companies to outsource your SEO or web development to them. My company on average gets three phone calls a day with SEO and web development outsourcing requests.
My old solution was to say, "we don't outsource." But it doesn't help, more and more companies call every day.
So we got creative and implemented Lenny. Lenny is an Asterisk PBX based IVR that basically deals with these calls in an automated fashion. You can learn more about it at itslenny.com but we basically integrated it into our PBX and now when we get these unwanted calls, we transfer them to Lenny.
It goes like this.... Someone calls and you detect they are selling you something. You say, oh, you need to talk to Lenny, I'll transfer you to Lenny. Then Lenny takes over.
Remember, Lenny is a robot. Here is a recording I took on Friday of a company trying to outsource SEO services that spoke to Lenny. It went on almost twenty minutes!
Amazing, don't you think?
Forum discussion at Google+ and Reddit.
Image credit to BigStockPhoto for sleazy salesman
