"Two of the central players ... were under lifetime bans against making telemarketing calls"
Wait, why isn't every human under such a ban?
Wait, why isn't every human under such a ban?
Because it would kill cold sales calls, which I think have a ton more value than you probably think they do (when ethically done).
For reference for a business I previously owned:
- Per 100 cold calls based on leads we qualified…
- We actually spoke to about 30 people…
- Of which about 10 were actually interested…
- Of which about 3 became customers.
- Customers paid on a monthly basis for an average of well over two years for our service.
For loosely qualified cold calls, this was a pretty big success, imho.
Yes, we mildly bothered 70 people (unanswered call), and we bothered 20 more with an unwanted sales pitch (usually less than one minute), but we had good conversations with 10 of them. Whether they became a customer or not, I think that we at least helped them understand clearly what their options were in our product market.
Ten percent of your interactions were even close to being considered not a nuisance (more like 3 percent were actually not a nuisance, someone listing to an advertisement willingly is still being interrupted and annoyed)
Fuck that man, come on. If you are bothering 100 people to POSSIBLY help a couple people possibly find a service that might help them, you are spam.
The issue is getting 10 completely silent calls per day, sometimes with an additional "your car warranty is expired" call. That's the issue everyone has a problem with - it's made answering your phone nearly useless.
I think you are missing the big picture.
Assuming that we waste 1 minute of time for 90 people, and everything else is productive, it’s:
- 90 minutes of aggregate inefficiency…
- to benefit 7 folks who have a much better understanding of the market for their current and future needs…
- and 3 people who are scaling their business for years via delegating something they are not good at to folks who are.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve had many many dud 90-minute encounters (much less one minute encounters) that were all worth it for the one encounter that moved the needle. This could be sales leads, training, dates, finding new restaurants… there are many domains for which this is true.
Frankly, I think that this is a fairly efficient ratio compared to most value-seeking activities in the world.
Edit: Note that the close rate was close to 40% live (versus 10% calls) with a non-significant n, so I think the medium itself was one source of inefficiency. The product was clearly needed by our leads, but trust-building was tougher over the phone.
From the point of view of the victims (or leads, as you might describe them), 70% deftly avoided you and 20% were annoyed that you intruded on their lives, albeit briefly. Or put another way, for every new customer you got, you actively annoyed ~7 of them, and confirmed the problem of unsolicited phone calls for a further ~23 of them.
Most people aren't interested in being tricked into opening their wallet, sorry. If I want your services, I'll seek them out. You're not entitled to even a second of my time.
I’m very curious about why “sales” automatically equates to “trickery” for you.
Ethical, high quality sales is the efficient matching of goods and/or services with folks who want them.
These types of sales exist and are not as uncommon as some HNers seem to think that they are.
> If I want your services, I'll seek them out.
You seem to assume that most people are good at finding services they need. In general, I have found this not to be the case both for me and many of my customers (at least not initially).
For me personally, I spend a shit ton of time on discovery, and I still find that random ads and sales pitches introduce me to things that I was not aware of.
FWIW, my service was a tech service, and my market was decidedly not tech savvy. One of the challenges of the sales process was getting them to understand and believe that we weren’t trying to bamboozle them (as many competitors were). We couldn’t sell them with technical explanations of why we were good or why some other option was not as good — we had to use non-technical explanations and an onboarding process that minimized the friction.
Ultimately, the proof of the pudding was in the eating, so we retained customers for much longer than industry average, with most of our churn being due to businesses being sold, closing, or moving beyond what we offered (at which point we referred them to an ethical provider that was appropriate for their newfound needs).
> You're not entitled to even a second of my time.
Honestly, I think you’re living a lesser life (especially professionally) if you are not willing to defer seconds, minutes, or even hours to speculative engagements.
It doesn’t take long to qualify a sales call for fit — the good sales people will know how to what itches they are good at scratching and whether you might have those itches.
What exactly would they fine me for?
I’m not robo-calling, I’m cold calling. Furthermore, all of my leads are internally generated and qualified B2B leads.
There is nothing illegal about this.
https://blog.close.com/is-cold-calling-legal/
You seem to have a big bone to pick for a domain you don’t understand very well.
I think you might be projecting a wee bit too much.
I guess you missed the following quote in the article I linked to (emphasis mine):
“Only 2% of cold calls convert. But 69% of buyers are willing to take a cold call, and 57% of C-level buyers want sales reps to contact them first.”
Most savvy business people are willing to take speculative engagements (within reason) — it’s just +ev to do so.
Let me be charitable and say that I think that a lot of tech sales is low quality (e.g., trying to force fit when there isn’t much/any) or downright scams (e.g., the alleged yelp “protection money” gambit), so I can understand that a tech-oriented community may be a bit jaded. That said, low quality sales interactions are not the norm in large swathes of the economy — it’s just as much or more of a waste of time for the sales person as it is for the potential buyer.
2. I want to know exactly how they asked the question, and how "contact them first" was interpreted by the people being surveyed.
3. Were your cold calls going directly to C-level buyers?
4. If 69% of buyers are willing to take a cold call, why do you think only 30% of people answered the phone, of which only a third were willing to listen to a pitch?
2. Very good question. I go back to, do you think it’s far from directionally correct? I think it’s close.
3. Small business owners ($1-10 million annual revenue).
4. Great question. First, many of these folks do like I do and send non-contacts to voicemail (they’re busy). Second, I clearly stated who I was, what my company did, and the specific problem of theirs that I wanted to solve. I’m guessing that a healthy chunk of that delta was just folks for whom my offering was not a hair on fire problem, so they didn’t call back (few people answered directly, most were call backs). There was probably a small percentage of wrong number, closed/closing business, etc.
Note that I was selling a technical service to a mostly non-technical crowd, so they really had no desire to do research. Most of the folks really seemed to appreciate talking to someone who could answer their questions in a way they could understand (e.g., saying something “loads slowly” rather than “is bloatware”). My goal was always to do a few things: 1) help them understand what they needed and tell them the verbiage they needed to use to ask for it, 2) to determine if we offered what they needed, and 3) if we were not a good fit, let them know what I thought were good fits. I also tried to give some free advice on easy wins like how to get good GBP reviews (with a cheat sheet if they wanted it).
I got a not small number of referrals from folks who didn’t sign up with us but referred their acquaintances to us due to the positive, but not closed, sales experience they had with me/us.
As for the rest I'm at least glad you're finding a good number of people you're making happy. But it doesn't sound like your experience would be an outlier in getting fewer listeners compared to other legitimate sales, so that still suggests to me that those survey numbers are wrong or very misleading.
It’s more likely that they find a good match with about 2% of them, and those 2% help grow their business.
I really get the sense that the people complaining the most about cold calling (different than robo-calling) are folks who:
- have little or no business experience
- have never had a good sales experience
- work in tech where the default sales experience sucks
Successful business people know what their hair-on-fire problems are, and they are willing to take on speculative engagements that may help them solve those problems. This is not rocket science.
I mean, that’s easy to say in a glib way on a site like HN, but are factoring in the full consequences of the knock-on effects of a high-friction economy?
Oh, ads are annoying? Ok, everything that is ad supported ceases to exist. Little or no TV, no social media (ok, this sort of seems like a win), no newspapers, no magazines, no radio, much smaller movie scene (since they can’t advertise), etc.
I’m all for having healthy boundaries and being able to set healthy boundaries, but your solution seems like overkill.
Fwiw, I set my phone on do not disturb for numbers not in my address book. That’s an easy way to not be bothered if that’s your jam (I just check messages if/when I want to).
I wouldn't place cold calling on the same level as regular ads, ostensibly I care for whatever I get from the place showing the ads, which might or might not be the case on cold calling (I get that you said that you only called relevant people, but based on the general sentiment, I think we can reasonably say that you're an outlier, and even then ~10% cared enough to answer)
As someone that receives plenty of calls from numbers not on their contact list, it feels wrong that I have to actively distrust, instead of dealing with the problem from the source , some countries (Like Germany) do ban cold calling, which seems the sane option to me, but I personally don't think America cares enough about privacy to even consider it
And this is the cost of spam. There are people who may not be in your phonebook who are legitimately trying to call you about someone in your family being e.g. in hospital.
Yet this is completely absent your analysis on the ethics of cold calling.
I'm sure cable fees (much of which go to broadcast stations) could pay for plenty of TV.
And social media could survive fine if it had to charge enough to cover servers.
Newspapers would be in more trouble but they're already in deep trouble.
Radio I'm not sure.
But instead, the phone companies probably decided they could make extra cash off the robocallers, not realizing they were killing the golden goose. I'm also 100% certain that both phone companies and members of Congress received bribes i mean sizeable campaign contributions and cushy think tank jobs over this.
So maybe 50-100 people made money, and absolutely ruined a working communication system. I hope it was worth inconveniencing the entire US population to make a little money, you shameless wieners.
Cold calling private individuals is illegal in Germany.
That's just reported complaints. Ya... this law is practically un-enforceable. A couple example cases doesn't mean Germany banned cold calling when apparently thousands and thousands and thousands go un-prosecuted.
Also i just don't get cold calls, and know no one else that gets these... it works!
So instead I will just say that I dislike you very much and I hope you have an awful, poopy day.
You, and those like you, are the reason we can't have nice things.
> You, and those like you, are the reason we can't have nice things.
Cheers.
I love you, too.
I will be sure to remember your kind words when my customers thank me for doing such a good job (which is typical and often).