Imagine for a minute that you’re busy at work with a major deadline looming or furiously scrambling to get the kids into the car for the morning school run.
And the phone rings.
It’s a telemarketer. In fact, it’s an insistent telemarketer with all kinds of cunning questions and well-honed tactics to keep you guessing and – most importantly – on the phone.
You’re busy. You’ve got other priorities. They’ve interrupted you and chances are what they’re selling isn’t something you’re interested in buying anyway. Even if you were, now is certainly not the right time.
If this happened to you, chances are you wouldn’t be too pleased. It’s been happening to me all day.
But this is how we traditionally treat our prospective clients and customers all the time. Even if you don’t use telemarketing you’re still interrupting people. You get in the way of their favourite TV show. You pop up in the middle of an interesting article in their favourite magazine. You litter their ‘in tray’ with your direct mail.
Of course you may have something useful to say – and maybe even something useful to sell them. But you’re doing it on your terms and expecting your intended audience to make your business their priority – when what they really need to do is get Jimmy to put his shoes on and get in the car.
In short, we’ve got things the wrong way around.
We need to stop trying to force our prospective customers to listen when they’re least willing to. We need to start making solutions to their problems available to them when they need them.
Does that mean we stop using telemarketing or advertising or direct mail? Perhaps. More to the point, we need to look again at how we use the tools available to us.
