Sales Guy on Line Two

Has anyone since the fall of Rome ever purchased anything from a cold-call Telemarketing call.

I'm not speaking of the androids who call you at home at night (though they have a special place in heart), I'm talking about this nation's estimated 29 billion ham-n-eggers who refer to themselves as anything from "Senior Account Executives" to "Senior Strategic Marketing Specialist Courtesy Calling Carbon-based B2B Executive Special Advisor to Other Specialists".

Seriously. Since we've been keeping the records, has anyone ever bought anything from one of these calls?

And it's not just the outsourced boiler room telemarketing "firms" that do this. Most of the Fortune 1000 that are in the product or professional services business do this to their customers and the people and companies they want to be their customers. And here we are, early in the year Two Thousand and Eight, waiting for the first big "close"; the first transaction.

While waiting, I advise us all to pack a lunch four times the size of the buffet line @Uncle Tony's Wicked Huge All You Can Ingest Pasta Factory".

Nobody is buying because Cold Call Telemarketing stopped working shortly after that Mother of an Asteroid took down those four-story lizards that the children love so much.

Ask 100 businesspeople who routinely buy things from vendors...Ask them about any recent purchase/transaction. Go ahead, ask them. "How many of you cats bought that widget because some stranger interrupted you in the middle of the work day and pitched you on how you can leverage their strategic, mission-critical, scalable, critical mass, dashboard,infrastructure solution...with two tablespoons of levergable strategery".

Now I'm going to flip this, completely.

Some of those 100 businesspeople have bought from a stranger who approached them first. In fact, several.They just don't think of these people/vendors as strangers because now they think of them as friends or at least advisors or trustworthy vendors.

So how do you do that?

I know how to do that.

I takes some time, at minimum several weeks. Typically a few if not SEVERAL months. But in the end you get a customer, hopefully one of those coveted 80/20 types, but there are NO FLIPPIN' SHORTCUTS. You don't manufacture relationships. It's not a helluva lot different than romantic relationships. It needs to be cultivated and nutured. You don't ask the person you were just introduced to to marry you. 99% of the people who have the words "Sales Weasel/Sales Manager/Sales Director/VP of Sales/ in the Occupation Field on their W2 do not understand this.

And the world keeps spinning.