I made that kind of mistake often early on in my sales career. The product I sold had a specific use in a specific field by specific disciplines, and was required by law in certain regions.
I always felt like such a dick when I'd get to the purchasing agent, make my hurried nervous pitch because I'm so excited to get through to someone and they'd (often kindly) explain that they literally never have any use case for my product.
After a few of those, I became more aware of how to prune my "leads" (read: list of phone numbers) to make sure I was only reaching out to people who could even use the dang thing and inserted a few exploratory questions into the opening salvo to double check.
I'm glad I don't have to do this via email, though. At least with the phone, I can hear tone and get quick, definite answers instead of just waiting on a reply.
Oh, one hundred percent. The way I treat people who have zero decision making ability differed greatly from purchasing agents or decision makers. They were largely in the same spot as me. It's important to understand that the sales agents are also wage slaves, the tasks are just different.
Dealing with people like me was one of the stupid things they gotta do at work to make their pay and go home, just like me making 80+ calls an hour at some points was one of my stupid things. I wanted to get them off the phone as soon as possible, be that either by ending the call or getting passed onto someone who could buy. You can use that to build rapport and speed up the process. You can even make it jovial. The goal is to make the sales process as painless as possible while recognizing that being a pest is effective.
Sales agents who put the big pitch on the second they get someone to talk to em are not thinking straight and hindering themselves. Though, sometimes there's parts of a service that simplifies their lives, which I'd mention while waiting for a decision maker or during another break.
I'm in the former group. Not just that, but I'm good at sales. Like, nicknamed The Closer and that sorta corporate motivational bullshit at one point good.
I will strike up conversations with people in a bar and make new friends waiting in lines. It's a talent, but its also a skill that can be taught and learned. It's a hat you wear to help you at work.
All that said, cold calls suck ass and they're a nuisance on most any individual. I'd refuse to do them on non-business customers.
As someone who's had to do cold calls as part of a sales pipeline,
it's spam,
I wouldn't say it's spam on LinkedIn, that's where I tell lies to get better jobs,
if it's B2B, I do not feel any shame, every business is a fuck
Edit: I'll also add that B2B cold calls do work. If you have a good product or service and approach it the right way, you can generate plenty of business this way. That said, it's wholly a numbers game. When I was training sales agents, they'd ask me "how do I get sales like you do?" and I'd tell em simply "Make more calls." As I said elsewhere, I'm good at this. I had a roughly 2-3% conversation rate. Understand that means if I made a hundred calls, I made two to three sales. And that's pretty damn good. Before we were more established and could drop that model, we found that cold calling generally had around a 1.4% conversion rate. It relies on you being chipper and persistent to the point of annoyance. Some people literally do break at one point and say stuff like "Well, I need to get something, and if I sign with you, will you stop calling me?"
It was always far more enjoyable to call established leads, people who already expressed and interest and just needed help making up their mind. Better on the customer, better on the agent, a better process overall.
He's right. The idea of a sub $15k sedan is a threat to the US auto market. Make it an EV to boot and America just can't compete in the free market.
It's a shame that the common person has to get shafted to protect the auto industry and while I have zero sympathy to the c-level management and shareholders, the auto industry does employ many working class folks who could be very much harmed by cheap imported cars.
I think this is a different issue than big numbers.
I have zero mechanisms available to me to reign in national spending anyway. If the debt were $10 dollars, that’d still be the case. But even if I did, the national debt doesn’t affect me in the slightest, why should I care if it’s $10 or $10T?
Sorry, I don’t think I follow as to why that’s bad. If I pay, say, $1,000 in rent and earn $3,000 a month, it’s the same thing as if I paid $10,000 in rent and made $30,000 a month.
While I can see how those numbers could be reduced into smaller numbers easily, I’m not sure I understand why that is beneficial. My material conditions don’t change.
But the national debt is irrelevant to me. It has zero impact on my day to day life. It’s just some imaginary number pundits can shout about to push their utterly disconnected agendas.
Even if I could wrap my head around it, that wouldn’t improve the credit rating of the nation, even if I could manage to care one iota about that.
I’m sorry, I’m just struggling to understand why it’s useful to have a national debt that’s a small enough number for me to visualize some quantification of it.
Don’t get me wrong, I’d much rather be paying $266 in rent, though if I’m making one third of what I do now, I’m still in the same spot, just… with smaller numbers.
Is this a problem, though? There’s currencies like the Yen which have high numbers, the users just adjust their mindset of how much is “a lot”. Reducing the numbers wouldn’t change the problems of things getting more expensive. This feels like treating a very cosmetic symptom of a much larger problem.
The wealthy would still possess an obscene and unfathomable amount of wealth and the impoverished would still be struggling to get by, just the numbers would be smaller. Does that help anything?