When marketing gets aggressive

So I get sales calls to my business line.

My business line is for clients or potential clients to contact me. That’s why I have it.

I don;t have it simply so that other businesses can keep calling me to sell me their products/services - especially when most of them don’t even know my name.

If I’m in a good mood, I’m turn the sales pitch around and offer my services to them.

Normally, though, it’s “Thanks but not thanks - goodbye.”

This week one of them called back asking how I could reject their product/service if I didn’t know what it was.

My response was that a good salesman knows when he has a good prospect - and I was definitely not that, and hung up again.

I posted about it in the forums, where Dave Ashton - who runs a telesales company - pointed out that their are outfits like his that have real sales skills and professionalism, as opposed to low-quality comission-only sales fodder.

Funny to see a few stories of late hit the blogosphere about sales campaigns that get aggressive against potential prospects.

Firstly, Lorien posts about getting called back three times by a telesales who refused to take no for an answer.

Then Eric Weaver at Ad Verse posts about a story carried in AdRants and Boing Boing, about someone trying to escape a company email list, only for them to apparently track them down via a credit check to get the email back on the list.

Seems that in the age of New Marketing, something is going awfully awry if the marketing teams are all for developing relationships with the customer, but the sales people insist on doing it by the gun.