Yet Another Sales Call Failure

Wednesday, February 03 2010 -

I’m not sure why I seem to be on the receiving end of a lot of these lately, but it is rather sad.

“Hello, <insert my company name here> how can I help you?”

“I’m looking for <employee who left the company 2 years ago>.”

“Sorry, he’s no longer with us. Can I help you?”

“He asked us to call back.”

At which point I scratch my head. He asked you to call back 2 years ago huh? “What is this about?”

“Oh I’m with <very large datacenter provider>…. we’ve been talking to a lot of <my companies datacenter provider> customers and I know they’ve had a lot of outages….”

He mentioned the “outages” and “failures” a number of times. The thing is, to my knowledge, his company is the one who has suffered high profile outages this year. We certainly have not. So I ended the call and he asked if he could supply some contact information. I say sure: tim@<mycompany>.com.

The funny thing was he had to have me repeat the company name more than once. He wasn’t even aware of what company he was calling.

Note to all sales idiots out there. If you call me, pushing a service, you damn well better know what the name of the company you are calling is because if I have to tell you who you called you are not going to get my business.