Dell recently did this to about half a dozen people on my team. 'Q2 Budget Review', which sounds official, but is really a Dell rep trying to sell you junk that magically pops up on your calendar _even if you mark their message as spam_.
Dirty way to get by executive assistants, too.
If you put this shit on my calendar, I will never purchase a product from you. I will additionally, at my own discretion, use it as proof that you have had a data breach and are unable to keep your accounts safe since no real company would really do this on purpose.
Don’t you get it?! They wouldn’t do it if it didn’t work, and you are vastly outnumbered. It’s not right, it’s bloody annoying, but it’s there and it’s not going away.
Google needs to fix the root problem, so that the spammy behaviour is not possible.
It is quite possible that the successes are more visible than the failures and thus it seems like it works. Or it "works" for the sales rep because he gets more leads and thus a bigger bonus, while hurting the company - but the company hasn't figured that out yet. Or it works in the short term but isn't worth the reputation damage in the long term.
Of course it's also possible that it just works, just pointing out that reality shows that people and companies often do things that are just stupid.
And what of the efficacy compared to the negative reputation gained from such practices? How do they measure that?
The number of times I've managed to convince someone not to use a service because of data breaches or poor security settings is precisely 0.
If people are OK with banks and retirement accounts that follow poor security standards, they won't really care about Dell.
Sales droids don't think the same way regular people do. A lot of them really believe everybody is as extroverted as they are and introverts are just pretending. And that everybody would be as excited about their product as they are, if they only knew about it. The best sales people can adopt the point of view of their prospects; mediocre ones cannot.
I definitely wouldn’t call any of them sales droids. Usually they’re just given really tough goals and quotas to hit.
And while none of the salespeople I’ve worked with would book unsolicited appointments, I could see it happening at companies who don’t have a very mature sales org and just throw their account managers to the sharks and expect them to make it rain.
From experience, I suspect that most salespeople who resort to invasive tactics really don’t expect everybody to be excited about their product. They are just desperately trying to keep their heads above water to avoid getting fired - a very human, non droid like thing to do.
That doesn’t excuse it, of course.
I'll outweigh your anecdote with mine, because the only two companies where I had to work with sales people, in both places the sales people were exactly as the parent described.
One cheated on his bride-to-be just to make a sale.
Not sure there's a distinction there.