If you are a sales person and you want to cold call me
at my company, here are some tips.
- Concise. Just send me a brief email telling
me what you offer and how it will help me. Ideally that's
about two paragraphs, and plain text vs. "rich" email with
your stupid logo etc.
- No voice mail. Please do not leave me voice mail,
as I get too many sales calls and don't have time to listen
to them all. Use email.
- Email hunting. Please do not do email address hunting
by sending email to all forms of my address you can guess
(paul.english@ and paul@ and penglish@ etc) unless you want
to make it clear that you do not know me or that I'm not
important enough to you for you to just find my
actual email address:
.
- Shotgun.
Do not contact more than one person at my company
at the same time. This is offensive. It might save you time, but I
don't appreciate your duplicating our time or trying to work around
one of us.
- Name dropping. If you got to me through one of my board
members etc, have that person ask me to contact you.
If they are not willing to email me (and hopefully they will use
judgement and not barage me with everyone trying to sell to my
company), you probably should not even bother naming them in your cold
call to me.
- Competitors. Do not mention that you are also talking with
my competitors. This will not motivate me to try to more quickly get a
deal done with you before they do; it will instead cause me to ignore
you.
- Events. Do not offer to take me to some sporting event. If
we are not yet business partners, I don't want to waste my time or
your time "hanging out".
Sorry if this is harsh.
