Dumb Company #2
This company plainly has so many prospective clients waiting to waste its time, that they have created a Helpful Form on their website through which RFPs are to be submitted. Somebody named Todd probably wrote some logic to quietly flush the RFPs that failed to meet some criterion or other. The embarrassing result was, of course, a flustered account executive trying to get in on the bid three weeks later, after the prospective client called to see why they weren’t responding. If you must use forms on your site, maybe don’t impose them on people who want to give you money. Save them to torture the people who already have given you money.
Dumb Company #3:
This company was so tired of receiving emails from peasants, they had Todd turn on the force fields to prevent anything unpleasant from getting through. Kind of like his colleague Bethany is in charge of keeping people with talent from getting inside, Todd is charged with keeping people with money from breaching the ramparts. In this case, he cleverly makes sure mail from places like Yahoo, Gmail or LinkedIn bounces screaming into space. That included the RFP sent by a consultant with just such an email address.
Dumb Company #4:
They also put a Helpful Form on their website, with a mandatory checkbox for whether the sender was a business or not. My friend, soliciting quotes for a large charity event, quite correctly selected the no box, since, technically, the cause is not a business. They were somewhat surprised when, after receiving no reply, my friend mentioned on Facebook that they seemed to have gone out of business. Todd made sure that none of those dirty Not Businesses got through to sales.
We’ve been afraid of our customers for some time now, and we deal with that by forcing them into horrible IVR systems, making them fill in forms describing the problem they can’t describe and ensuring there is no reasonable way for them to reach a human being on their first try.
We are terrified of job applicants, charities wanting a handout, whiny customers, and, it seems, revenue.
Is it any wonder that sales people hand out their personal email addresses and store their leads on post-it notes?
Before you go and yell at Todd and take away his refurbished Commodore 64, consider that Todd is just an instrument of your corporate insistence on not talking to strangers. You need to deal with that.
How did we do it before clever things like spam filters, algorithms and Todd? Well, I’m a little hazy but if memory serves we got these things in envelopes that the post office dropped off everyday. Some were obviously junk, and those we chucked in the garbage; the rest were examined and considered by real human beings and then sent onward to the appropriate party. It just wasn’t difficult, and since the post sometimes contained things like offers to give us money, or even money itself, it was deemed a worthwhile activity. When did that change?
Since marketers own the website, and we own the world’s initial experience with our brand, I’m thinking it’s on usto figure out how to let in people who have money or talent or questions.
Related Posts:
Holy Crap, I’m a Porcupine
Lost Squirrels: Putting Sales Where it Belongs
BizMarketer is Elizabeth Williams
You can reach me at escwilliams@gmail.com
or follow me on Twitter @bizmkter
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