I get a lot of sales calls on my line at work. To date I have never received a call that offered a product or service relevant to us because (a) if the salesperson had done any research at all, they would know that my boss would not be the appropriate person to call and (b) if cold call telemarketing is your sales approach, you clearly don’t know anything about how high tech companies function.
My reaction to a cold call depends on the techniques of the salesperson, which can vary from polite to sleazy. When callers are very professional and courteous, I explain that they have called the wrong person, but I also take the time to tell them a little bit about who we are and what we do. It’s a fun opportunity to turn an unwanted sales pitch into an evangelism moment. Sometimes we part on mutually friendly terms, with the cold caller feeling just a bit more enlightened.
About half of the sales calls I get are from people who lie to me. They ask for my boss, but they use nicknames that my boss doesn’t use. I play dumb and explain that that person isn’t in this office. They get confused and say “I just wanted to catch up with him about a conversation we’d had.” I then cheerfully explain that, although my boss has a gender ambiguous name, she is a woman. Then comes some awkward silence. Doh! You have been pwned by moi, who has the finest tuned BS detector this side of the Mississippi. They usually hang up at that point, because being busted for lying — however politely — is totally embarrassing. Some of them shamelessly perservere after their shady attempt to bypass me and still think that I’m going to let them try to convince her that we need their service to come in and train us how to use MS Office. It doesn’t happen. I happily pretend to take a message and don’t feel any guilt over that. After all, they lied first.
If somebody wants to sell me something, being pushy will just make me want to transfer him to the Teletubbies phone extension, which we keep around for this exact purpose. (“The person you are trying to reach has been brutally murdered by the Teletubbies!”) But lying to me? How on earth is that the foundation of a positive business relationship? The salespeople who call Mozilla have rarely done their research on who we are or how we function, which is usually why they’re peddling the wrong wares with the wrong methods. I suppose it shouldn’t surprise me that if they haven’t even bothered to research the gender of the person they are calling, then they wouldn’t understand that using lies to push an end goal violates good business ethics.
So just a word to you skeezy sales guys out there: you cannot bypass the Human Spam Filter. I understand psychology. I understand sales technique, and I understand that closing a deal is infinitely more important to you than actually serving my needs. That’s just how you roll. Just please be prepared to be called on it when you lie.
