As a business with public contact information, we are inundated with sales calls. The process generally runs roughly like this:

  1. We get a phone call from a number that is often “blocked” for caller ID. We’ve learned to screen those calls. Some leave a voicemail, some do not. If they aren’t blocked, we’ll answer the call, and we’ll generally get blasted with a run on sentence. If it’s a short introduction, I’ll politely decline. If it’s a long monologue, I’ll hang up.
  2. We get a followup email from the caller describing their service. They will ask for a 15-30 minute introductory discussion/presentation. Depending on how good the email is (in terms of grammar and presentation), I’ll drop a reply saying that we’re not interested or ignore it entirely.
  3. I’ll often get a 2nd email saying something like, “when would be a good time to follow up with you. How about I drop you a line in 3 months to see how things are going?” Um, no thank you.
  4. The really well-trained salesfolks will often also say, “Do you know of anyone else who might be looking for our services?” The answer to this is always no. I’m not going to make an introduction (which is often tantamount to an endorsement).

  5. I don’t want to be a jerk to salesfolks. I’m sure they are by and large good folks and are just trying to do their job. But we NEVER BUY ANYTHING THIS WAY. Between a few Google queries and a few “lazyweb tweets or emails”, I can drum up a short list of vendors who are thought well of by SOMEONE, and perhaps can get a list that are actually recommended by people that I know and trust. Why would I ever buy from the salesperson who happens to be calling me? Even if they were introducing me to a class of software/service that I wasn’t aware of and really wanted, the first thing I’d do is thank them for the info and start googling.

    As people get smarter about searching and social networking (and thus social recommendations) go mainstream, I continue to wonder at the future of outbound lead generation via phone/email.

    So, I’ve got a new canned response in Gmail:

    Thanks for your inquiry.

    RescueTime does not respond to unsolicited sales requests and we’d prefer to not receive them.

    When we’re interested in software or services, we prefer to do some combination of searching on the Internet and asking trusted people in our network for their recommendations.

    If you’re interested in earning our business, your best bet is to serve the customers you have well so that when we ARE looking for what you offer, you’ll be highly recommended in our network and across the web.

    Thanks for your understanding.

    Cheers,

    -Tony Wright, founder of http://rescuetime.com

    http://blog.rescuetime.com (company blog)
    http://tonywright.com (personal blog)