Like you, I get a lot of emails, phone calls and voicemails I didn’t ask for. I’m surprised at just how many lists my name must appear on that people are willing to buy. And the hit rate for emails/calls I’m actually interested in is extremely low. I’d guess less than 1%.
Knowing that cold calling isn’t something anyone likes, I at least try to answer the phone as much as possible to give people 30 seconds of my time … however I recognize that I don’t get paid to answer my phone either, so I do my best to manage that properly. The problem is that I’ve seen an increase in the following tactics from cold calls:
- “Hi, I want to know what it takes to get on your approved vendor list…” (I don’t even know you or what you are doing, so why are we starting there?)
- “… we help IT managers reduce costs and set strategic objectives that are inline with the business and managed to tight budgets.” (So… you help IT managers do their job for them?)
- “I was wondering if you have any old equipment we could buy back.” (That one is such a good intro and always leads to you having to pay them.)
- “What are your challenges for this year.” (Avoiding phone calls like this? Is that a valid answer?)
- (Paraphrasing) “We do everything.”
I find that if I ask people to give me the highlights of their company in an email it works out well. I can then view the information on my own schedule, check out their website and decide if I need to follow-up with them. Occassionally, people clearly don’t like that idea and I’ll tell them to explain what they do and why I should be interested in 30 seconds (the typical elevator speach). Most people can’t do it (and are presumably still talking if I hang up).
However, I think I’ve cracked WHY people are calling/emailing me so often: they think I’m someone I’m not. This morning, I followed a link in an email I didn’t ask for to get more information. It was a unique URL that clearly went to the database they purchased with my info in it. The system brought in all of my information into a web page with fields completed that I just had to double-check. I discovered that I work for the government, in another country and have a title that defies description:
Tags: emails, telemarking
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