Comment by csa | Hacker News Reader

Comment by csa | Hacker News Reader

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> You have provided a great example of how worthless cold calling is to society.

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 your point of view, it's great--there's no downside. A little "Aggregate inefficiency" as you put it.

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.

> Assuming that we waste 1 minute of time for 90 people, and everything else is productive

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.

> Most people aren't interested in being tricked into opening their wallet, sorry.

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.

Fingers crossed the FTC finds and fines you. If it’s big enough maybe you’ll have some empathy for your victims, or at least the calculus will change in society’s favor.

> Fingers crossed the FTC finds and fines you.

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.

If the law is so far divorced from what everyday people see as a scourge, then perhaps it is the law that has a poor understanding of reality. Just because bothering people is legal doesn't mean it's ethical.

> what everyday people see as a scourge

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.

1. I don't trust the biased source of that number.

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?

1. Fair enough. Do you think it’s far from directionally correct?

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.

1-2, I don't know enough about small business owners to have a firm guess, but I'm definitely suspicious and I treat this as very weak information.

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.

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