Ok, I know times are rough and people have to do what they have to do, but I can think of a few jobs I'd do before I did door-to-door solicitation or cold-call telemarketing. Those include pizza delivery, shoe shiner, newspaper delivery, and car wash attendant, for starters.
Today we got a very aggressive telemarketer calling our sales line. He called from Nalpeiron and told the person answering the phone that I was expecting his call and was very aggressive. Would not take no for an answer. So I got on the line and listened to him begin his pitch. Of course I've never heard of him or his company before. So when I called him on treating our staff poorly and deceitfully, he came back with some nonsense about me working with someone else there and he was just going off their notes. I asked him to remove us from their list and ended the call.
You'd think that was enough, but no, and this is why I'm bothering to write about it. I almost immediately got an email from him. Not personalized, but the same kind of unsolicited junk I normally get. This email also had no opt-out information on it, putting them in violation of the CAN-SPAM act. Fortunately, the FTC provides an email address to forward these kind of messages to (spam@uce.gov). So kindly add them to your own list of companies that don't respect you or your business.
And just for kicks, I looked up their ISP and forwarded the message to his ISP's tech support.
The folks from Cbeyond never replied, by the way. No surprise.
We have a solicitor problem at C&P. Our building has a very visible "no soliciting" sign in front, but I doubt it's ever given any of them a moment's hesitation. We also don't have a traditional receptionist desk, so people can walk into offices without checking in anywhere. This has been taken advantage of long enough. Starting today, I'm going on the offensive. These folks who intrude on our workplace unwelcome and without anything to give us (I had to throw that in because La Salsa brought us chips & salsa today) are now being called out. Cbeyond, you're up first, and man did your sleazy rep earn it. I would not be surprised in the slightest to see on his resume "selling stereos from the back of a van in the Albertson's parking lot".
So here's the email I sent to their general information, media/PR, national sales, and regional sales addresses. I'm not expecting a reply, but in the interest of fairness, I'll post whatever I get (or at least summarize). Oh, and please don't give these guys your business.
Greetings,
I manage a business in Oceanside, California (near San Diego), and have had an extremely unpleasant experience with your business that I hope someone there would appreciate hearing about. First, I was cold called by your sales staff and though I don't usually field such calls, I explained that we had recently purchased a phone service and that we were happy with our ISP, so we weren't interested.
Apparently this was not sufficient, because we had a visit from a couple of your representatives at our office this week. We have a clear "no soliciting" sign on the building, but this did not dissuade them. They went through multiple unmarked office doors disturbing our staff (several trying to assist our own clients) before they got to me. I asked where they were from and established that they were here without an appointment and were indeed solicitors (which they denied). The one who spoke (the other being silent the whole time) went into a script about a referral program, despite my request he stop the pitch. I told him that we had already spoken on the phone and I explained that we weren't interested. He said that yes, we indeed had spoken and I had made that clear, but they wanted to come by anyway.
I calmly tried to explain that we have a no solicitors policy and at this point they had disturbed at least eight staffers from their tasks. He didn't listen to a word I said and several times just went back to his script. The rep was very rude and refused to leave several times when asked to do so. At no point was I uncivil, but he was impolite and sarcastically yelled back "don't work too hard" upon finally leaving. If this is how your leads are treated, I shudder to think how clients are treated.
My business supplies ad agencies, design firms, pr firms, and marcoms with enterprise software. We have our own sales force, but will never resort to aggressive cold calling and walking in on businesses uninvited and unwelcome. I'm sure you've done your research and found that you get success from it, otherwise you wouldn't do it, but I'm one of those cases that was treated so poorly that not only will my company never do business with yours, but I also intend to include this story in my corporate blog (with readership primarily consisting of IT decision makers).
I'll try not to appear too biased, but this new angle,though more relevant than Gates and Seinfeld doing the buddy thing, is an old tired argument. I guess in this economy and culture of remakes, sequels, and prequels, it seemed like the right time to dust it off and try it again. So much for their attempts to convince us they're hip or the product is superior. Now the message is "we're cheaper."
But what say you, system managers? Am I a shill like others? I think we can all agree that home users and business users are quite different creatures. While our users don't benefit much from the bundled software with a new Mac, it's nice not being obligated to install anti-virus software. I like that I can get a user up and running with a Dell (which we've had few problems with) for ~$300 (shameless plug for the C&P deals page), but we tend to be a Mac-based company, so everyone gets both. I guess we could end that with Parallels/VMWare. One more point for OS X.
Came across this review recently and it made me rethink what we keep in our own fire safe and how others use theirs. Ours is a much older model from Sentry with no data connectivity and it's just about full ( which is a good reminder to me to purge backups more often).
In the event that our automated backup scripts fail, we immediately take manual backups of our most critical databases, burn them, and throw them in the fire safe. Only once or twice do we take disks from there offsite as we already have a good system for our offsite backup.
Thank goodness we've never had a fire, but I am curious how well our safe would hold up. If we lost the contents of it, it wouldn't be the end of the world for us (due to our offsite), but we'd lose some old data that's not part of our current set as well as the raw video from our New User Training Videos (thankfully, they're still as useful as they were the day they were made).
So I'd like to hear from you other system managers. Do you have one or more fire safes? Onsite/offsite? What sorts of contents? And what's your strategy for adding contents and purging out as it fills?
