Earth to Sales Boiler-Rooms: It’s Not 1980 Anymore

Got a sales call this afternoon that was soooo pathetic, so 1980. The poor schlep wanted me to schedule an appointment with his field sales guy. Pretty much the first thing he said after telling me his name and his company (both unfamiliar to me) was that the rep would be in my area Thursday.

I politely replied that my time was very precious, and before I scheduled in in-person sales call, I wanted to find out “if it was a good fit for me.” And the first thing I wanted to know was what he was selling.

Turned out to be a credit card processing service. He offered me a free terminal if I would schedule the appointment to tell me about his “favorable” merchant processing rates, depending on the volume.

Well, first of all, I already own my own credit card processing terminal. Second, I’m a pretty low-volume shop, processing a few tickets a month for consulting and a few more for book orders that come to me directly (most are going through traditional book sales channels these days)—so I’m not likely to benefit much from his volume-based rates. And third, when he asked me yet again to set the appointment, I asked for information in writing so I could evaluate the rates. It would have been as simple as giving me a URL to type, but that thought did not occur to him, and probably not to his boss either. In fact, it didn’t even occur to this guy that he could mail or fax the information and then follow up later. (I actually switched to my current merchant processing company because that rep did exactly that, and his rates were in fact substantially better than what I’d been paying.)

Instead, he ended the call.

Well, I’ve got three pieces of advice for people using this selling model:

1. The customer or prospect is in charge these days. I don’t have to bow down to you and be sold to the way you happen to prefer to sell me. You have to offer me the chance to buy the way I want. If you want an in-person appointment and you haven’t shown me the value in it, I won’t meet you. If you want me to sign up over the phone and I want to see the terms in writing, you’ll provide the terms or go away empty.

2. We live in an empowered era. Your competitor is as close as a mouse click. If you won’t people research you, they’ll research, and do business with, somebody else.

3. It’s far more effective to build long-term customer relationships than to go for a quick one-time sale—and these tactics don’t build that relationship.

Of course, I could give them a lot more advice—in the pages of my award-winning books, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green and Grassroots Marketing.