I was sitting at my desk yesterday, minding my own business, when the phone rang. Because the number was local, I thought it could be a prospective client or potential lead. I picked up the telephone and was immediately assaulted by a seller of a certain product that shall remain nameless (though I named it yesterday on Twitter.) Without asking whether or not I had time for this intrusion, this person launched into the prepared sales speech. I went along in order to write this blog post – I’m confident that I’m not the only small business owner who feels this way about cold calling.
The economic downturn has caused a proliferation of this sort of behavior. While many people out there are experts on the reasons cold calling is a bad long-term sales tool, I think it is particularly insidious for small business owners who are already strapped for time and resources and may not have a gatekeeper to deflect these business killing interruptions.
If we band together as small business owners and refuse to give business to our peers who practice these tactics, who knows? Maybe they’d go out of business and leave us alone. So, here are the POSITUS Top Five Reasons to Give Small Business Cold Callers No Business.
- A cold caller cares more about him-or-herself than they do about you. Period.
- Cold callers do not mind wasting your time.
- Most cold callers are not looking to form mutually beneficial business relationships; whatever they seek from you is a one-sided benefit for them.
- People who practice cold calling typically don’t care whether you really need what they are selling.
- Cold callers think you are a push over to their well-crafted (or many times woefully deficient) sales pitch; they don’t respect you.
Let me be clear: if you hit me with a cold call, I will not work with you, and I will make sure that everyone in my circle of influence makes a different choice for what you have to offer by never listing you in a set of options. That is how truly damaging I think receiving cold calls can be for harried small business owners, because it puts them in a mode of reacting, of failing to devote time to other things that will benefit their businesses, and of devoting often scarce resources to things that have been given no strategic analysis or thought. The next time you as a small business owner are cold called, smile, talk over the person on the other end to say that you are no more interested in them than they are in you, and hang up.
Yes, Andra, this is a horrible “time vampire” that can just suck the blood right out of a small biz owner’s day.
Usually, I see this topic spoken of from the other side though (in terms of how unproductive cold calling is as a prospecting and selling tactic for small business). This is actually the first time I have seen it written about from the point of view of the one receiving the calls!
I take it you probably would have hung up on the person right off the bat, ordinarily, but still it is an interruption in concentration and focus, and it takes time to get back into the zone, especially if one is writing copy.
Thanks for your post!
Thank you, Bruce, for you comments. Yes, I normally would hang up. Instead, I used my aggravation to fuel my blog post. I’m glad that you found it unique and appreciate your comments.