I saw this and thought, well yeah that VP is right, cold calls are annoying spam. However, based on the insane comments by all the salespeople, you’d be wrong. Like, are salespeople that out of touch with normal people?
Number 2 is a great point. That’s what I hate about LinkedIn and why I only use it to look/apply for jobs and occasionally scroll through if I’m super bored.
My experience in my current job are endless cold emails from salespeople who don’t even understand that I have no use for their product. I work in a field where I have to research a lot of different equipment/parts for my client, but that I don’t use myself. I had to request a catalog from one of these places which involved giving my work email address. Now I get endless emails about how they’ll ‘be in my area’ (LOL no you won’t because I work remotely across the country from both my company and my client) and they want to demonstrate their new product…which I don’t use because I don’t work in that field. Makes me laugh every time and yes it is very spammy.
I made that kind of mistake often early on in my sales career. The product I sold had a specific use in a specific field by specific disciplines, and was required by law in certain regions.
I always felt like such a dick when I’d get to the purchasing agent, make my hurried nervous pitch because I’m so excited to get through to someone and they’d (often kindly) explain that they literally never have any use case for my product.
After a few of those, I became more aware of how to prune my “leads” (read: list of phone numbers) to make sure I was only reaching out to people who could even use the dang thing and inserted a few exploratory questions into the opening salvo to double check.
I’m glad I don’t have to do this via email, though. At least with the phone, I can hear tone and get quick, definite answers instead of just waiting on a reply.
It’s hard to get there on the phone now, though, if you don’t already have a name and phone number. You can probably get a name off LinkedIn, but a main phone number for a company probably won’t get you anywhere now since a lot of companies don’t have receptionists anymore. You’re lucky if the phone tree has a dial by name option. I’m glad I’m not in that kind of business anymore.
