Tag Archives: sales

Don’t call us, we won’t either

Picture by Karlis Kadegis

“Hello Mr. Van Haver, how are you today?”. As the opening line of a telephone call from a bloke I’ve never been in touch with before. Am I really the only one to spot from a zillion miles away that the sole intention of such call is to sell me something? Why on earth should that line be the opening line of every single one of those calls? As far as I recall, I did not include on my LinkedIn profile “stupid enough to make any amount of smalltalk cause increased inclination to buy anything”. Not alone are those callers interfering with whatever I was considering a proper use of my time, but they are clearly stupid enough to believe that politely (the use of the word polite obviously referring to the faked intent of the sender of the message, not to the actual effect caused in the recipient) checking how I am doing today – and thereby taking up even more of the time I was not willing to give them – is going to help them reach their goal in even the slightest way.

Aaahhhh. How I enjoy a good rant every now and then.

What spam looks like in real life

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[Notice: if at some point during the reading of this blogpost – which is partially an experiment in investigating decreased readability due to extensive use of side-thoughts – you have the feeling of losing track, an alternative version with color coding for improved readability is available here.]

If you’ve ever been employed in a sales position, chances are that at some point you had to work on a booth at a trade show. To an outsider this can look like pretty easy work: just hanging around on in some big hall all day and talking a bit to people visting the booth. Clearly those people have never had any first hand experience at it!

One of the surprising facts is that the work is actually more tiring on slow days, when there are not a lot of visitors to the fair, Continue reading →