What's the best way of responding to a cold call? I ask because we get loads here in The Times Business department - PRs offering thrilling opportunities to attend telecoms conferences in Harrogate and so forth - and have noticed we each have different ways of handling them.

My colleague Patrick Hosking, who sits opposite me, rarely gives unsolicited callers more than 15 seconds and his response usually involves a combination of the phrases not interested and put it in an e-mail please, goodbye. By contrast, Christine Seib, who sits to my right, can devote chunks of her working day to dealing with spurious queries, politely explaining why she can't help, and invariably ending each call with a cheerful “no worries”.

My general response, meanwhile, lies somewhere in between. I dislike unsolicited calls so intensely that anyone with an unfamiliar caller ID goes straight to voicemail. But when, occasionally, people get through this incredibly sophisticated screening system (and having once had to cold call as a door-to-door market researcher), I find it impossible to be rude and spend a bewildering amount of time listening to my name being mangled and being pitched irrelevant story ideas. I recently even extended my contract with Vodafone simply because I felt sorry for the person on the other end of the line.

Clearly I have a problem, so when I was forwarded an e-mail promoting the launch of a diploma in advanced cold calling, I thought I would get in touch with Direct Sales Accreditation Limited, the company behind the “five-month course of blended learning”, to get an insider's view of telephone marketing and hopefully develop a better sense of how to deal with them.

DSA's heading of training, one Simon Bell - fantastic name for someone in his industry - suggested spending a morning with him as he trained a bunch of telephone agents in Cheltenham, and it says something for his charm and impressive powers of persuasion that I did just that this Tuesday morning, waking up at 5am to drive there.

I spent a large portion of the journey wondering how DSA could make a subject like cold-calling fill a five-month course and was provided with an answer on my arrival: you take something simple and make it sound incredibly complex. So there was half an hour on “who is a telephone agent?” Half an hour on the radical idea that different customers might react differently to cold calls. And half an hour on the earth-shattering concept that some days might be better than others when you're a cold caller. “Good days and bad days come along so the sooner we accept that ... the sooner we can enjoy a circular flow of emotion as telephone agents.”

After several hours I'd had my fill and just before lunch, I put a question to the 12 people in the room: how many of them actually enjoyed cold-calling?

There was a lengthy pause before one person raised their hand. It was Simon Bell. “I love it,” he expounded. “Each call is different, you make new friends, and you get paid for it. I can't think of anything more fun.” Five minutes later I was on my way back to London, for I had my answer. The best response to cold calls is Patrick's: abruptness.

Let me explain my reasoning. Cold-calling is incredibly unpopular. The technique is seen as intrusive and associated with high-pressure sales techniques, silent calls and fake familiarity. Firms regulated by the FSA are not allowed to cold call, while the Telephone Preference Service (0845 0700707), which prevents those registered with it to be called by members of the direct marketing industry, has accumulated some 14.7 million subscribers since its launch in 1995.

Indeed, TPS, combined with its corporate equivalent, CTPS, which has gathered more than 600,000 registrations since its launch in 2004, and caller ID technology have made cold calling almost impossible. According to a survey published by the Direct Marketing Association last year, telemarketing accounted for just 5.5 per cent of all UK direct marketing - a decrease from 7.9 per cent in 2005.

Moreover, the hit rate for this ever-shrinking band of telemarketers is tiny. The survey reported that only 3.5 per cent of people have ever responded positively to a telemarketing call, while one Xerox salesman recently interviewed in a US newspaper said that he made 55 cold calls a day which resulted in one sale a week - a success rate of 0.36 per cent.

In other words, the industry is on the brink of dying, and is being kept alive only by the possibility of a rare positive response from softies like me and Christine. We might respond positively because we want to be nice but in doing so we are spreading misery, because we are prolonging the life of the cold calling industry, and also, paradoxically, prolonging the misery of the poor souls doing the cold-calling.

You see, no cold caller - and this is what the DSA experience made me appreciate - actually likes what they do. Jerry Hocutt, a one time school picture salesman who conducts a seminar in the US called Cold Calling for Cowards, puts it more brutally: “If you like cold calling, you need serious help.”

Frankly, if everyone was as abrupt as Patrick, the cold-calling hit rate would plummet from 0.03 per cent to 0 per cent and telemarketers could go and do something more meaningful with their lives, such as running telecommunications conferences in Harrogate.

Still, if you're just too much of a softie to bring yourself to be so brutal, you could try a more passive aggressive approach advocated by Douglas E. Palley, a man who runs his own telemarketing business in the US, but who says that he always responds to other company's telemarketers with the remark: “I'm sorry, Mr Palley died.” Apparently, it guarantees they won't call back.

sathnam@thetimes.co.uk

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