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In early 2000's, as B2B Product Manager, I implemented a similar customer outreach program. We will reverse lookup the name associated with visitor IP address and then look into our own sales contact database for contacts in that company. Depending on contact quality, we will reach out to them using phone, email or personal visit from a sales rep in the area.

A few times, we decided to hold 'lunch-and-learn' type in-person events in a region based on the regional concentration of IP addresses from prospect companies and search queries from those regions to tailor our presentations.

Wow. Any vendor doing this to me goes on a perma-ban list. If they don't respect me before the sale, I'd have no reason to think they'd respect me after.

Why do you think the proactive customer outreach is "not respecting you"?

I view it as providing high level of customer service, before and after sales, in B2B space. It is no different than Amazon displaying related products that you might be interested in or Netflix showing you a queue based on your past viewings, in consumer space.

For example, if a visitor's company produces widgets and as a vendor we have previously helped other producers of same widget. It is in both our and visitors interest to share such and related information. Similarly, a visitor from an existing customer might be searching for a solution to her problem with the vendor's product and doesn't believe the problem is big enough to warrant a support/service call or it is a user and not administrator/manager of the product. A proactive engagement by vendor support group goes a long way in understanding the potential user issues with product, a valuable insight for future product enhancements.

In B2B settings, sales cycles are long and require lot of information exchange between various stakeholders within the potential customer. Both vendor and potential user of the product inside the company (who might become internal champion of solution) benefit by build the relationship early, quickly and efficiently.

IMO, this is the main reason for DropBox failure in penetrating the enterprise despite its high usage by individual users within enterprise. Delays in engaging enterprise users allowed Box to get in to enterprise accounts by targeting decision makers and overriding individual users' preference.

It's disrespecting privacy. The examples you gave (Amazon and Netflix) know who you are. A better example might be looking at a product on the shelf at Best Buy, and an hour later the sales guy shows up at your house asking if you're still interested.

Browsing a website for the first time should never result in a phone call. I agree with the parent -- this behavior will result in a lifetime net of $0 from me to you.

The part I find deeply disrespectful, even more than the hella creepy privacy violations, is your notion that I'm incompetent to decide for myself who I need to talk to.

It's not like your web site is hiding the phone number or lacking in other ways for me to contact you. If I look at your website and don't use them, I have decided not to talk to you. It's essentially disrespectful for you to say "Oh, you poor fool, you don't know what you're doing. Clicking once is too hard for you. I'd better call you right away."

And then once the phone rings, we're off to the races with a host of manipulative sales tactics. Whee! Just how I wanted to spend my afternoon.

You try to wrap this manipulation up in the language of helping. But when you sing the praises of "build[ing] the relationship early, quickly and efficiently", you ignore that only one relationship is going to get built; the rest is just a giant waste of time, the very opposite of efficiency. And your last paragraph really gives away the lie. The point of the techniques isn't to help the customer. It's to allow the vendor to dominate a market without respect to actual product quality.

Perfectly said. Thank you!

Thanks. As a kid, I'd read my grandfather's real estate sales manuals and I always found them both fascinating and horrific. The hacker in me always appreciates good technique. But there was just no getting around the fact that it was all about manipulating other people into doing whatever got you paid.

In a way, I feel bad for akg_67 and people like him. Our morals too easily conform to our jobs. As Upton Sinclair says, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." I was lucky enough to see the problem young, and lucky again that I could afford to make my living some other way. But there are a lot of people stuck in these ethical traps. I wish there were more ways out for them.

Do you recall any details of those manuals? Company-specific stuff, or National Association of Realtors (NAR) stuff?

What time period?

This would be late 70s/early 80s. My memories are hazy, but I suspect it was third-party stuff.

Thanks. Sounds pretty bog standard for sales, but dovetails in with some related stuff I'm looking at.

Sales is a very telling counterpoint to economic "free market" theory.

Yes, definitely.

I look at sales and advertising as an arms race. If nobody did it, we would be fine, especially now when publishing is free and search is incredibly good. But if anybody does it, all their competitors are obliged to keep up.

The free-market equilibrium is obviously wasteful. I'm sure we could save a half-trillion dollars a year if we eliminated this sort of arms race. I'd expect free market advocates to be excited about this because it would also remove a great deal of market distortion, allowing market mechanisms to work better. Their lack of interest I take as a tell: what really motivates them is not free markets.

Quite.

I'm doing some research on Edward Bernays again. Absolutely fascinating and revolting creature.

If you've not seen Adam Curtis's The Century of the Self, do.

I also think that Free Markets are a smokescreen, though I'm not sure all those using as such realise it. I'm fairly convinced the main propaganda ministers -- the Mont Pelerin Society, Atlas Network, Cato, etc., do. Johan Norberg is their currently annointed Prince of Darkness.

"It is no different than Amazon displaying related products that you might be interested in or Netflix showing you a queue based on your past viewings, in consumer space."

Is is very different imho. Looking up contact details of site's visitors by IP is much like following a person back home and try to sell him something just because he stopped by your shop's window briefly. That's just creepy, I would never deal with a company that does that.

I used to work for a company where a vendors first unsolicited sales call would get them on our grey list. That being a list of vendors we would only consider purchasing from as an absolute last resort.

A second unsolicited sales call would result in permanent blacklisting.

Our IVR system warned callers that unsolicited sales calls would result in this action.

In the IT department alone 90% of incoming calls were sales calls. After this rule was brought in the volume was much reduced.

Also, we learned a lot of new swear words from angry salespeople.

This is actually very common and much more sophisticated in the B2B world. Look into companies like http://id.kickfire.com/

This has happened with me. I do Pardot implementations from time to time, and one time I forgot to delete a test record with my info out of a production system we were about to launch. Time goes by, and I end up hitting their site to check out a bug they wanted me to fix. This flagged my contact in their system as "warm", and no less than 15 minutes later my phone rings.

I suppose this speaks more to my competency level than to theirs, whoops!

Exact same thing happened to me, though with a different IT-related vendor.

Yep, this happened to me once when I was house hunting earlier this year. I was pretty livid, and the poor rep on the other end found that out pretty quickly.

As terrible as it is, it's rather ingenious.