Professional Courtesy

A friend of mine recently decided to give up working in his professional field (he holds a CA designation), and get involved with financial planning. Through the particular organization he joined, he was required to do a lot of 'cold calls', knocking on people's doors. He's shared a number of stories about his experience with me, but one of the things about knocking on doors is that, if they are home, almost everyone will answer. And when they do, they will either say 'Yes, I'm interested', or 'No!, I'm not interested!', (or something a bit more colourful). But the thing is, he always gets a definitive response.

Let's put that into a Business-to-Business context. Imagine you download a product information sheet from a website, and in doing so provided some contact info. The vendor responsible for the whitepaper contacts you via email to ask about your interest. You ignore it. They follow-up with a telephone call, and you avoid the call. They place another three or four calls to you over the following week, and you ignore every one of them (Call Display at work!). Eventually the vendor gives up and moves on to the next prospect.

So what was accomplished? Well, let's see - you wasted the vendor's time and resources when they tried to contact you. You wasted your time by consciously deciding to ignore the phone calls and sitting there listening to the phone ring. You probably created some unnecessary anxiety for yourself, because you feel you're being harassed by the vendor. And you both probably have a lesser opinion of the other after the interaction (or lack of).

Here's option 'B' - you answer the phone. Give the vendor thirty seconds to tell their story. At the end of that, make a definitive decision to either continue the discussion or thank the vendor and say you're not interested. I know you're probably thinking you have no obligation to the vendor, and in simplistic terms that's true. But if you think about your own company's outbound marketing and sales activities, imagine how much time they would save if they weren't chasing ghosts. How much time collectively would we all save if people were just honest with each other at the front-end of discussions...