The Marketing Bureau

By Brian H Meredith
From the NZBusiness Magazine"Marketing Maestro" Archive
First published September 2000

One of my colleagues was away from her desk earlier this morning and I intercepted an incoming call on her phone.

I was ultra professional and polite– after all, I’m a Marketing Consultant. Need to practice what I preach.

I was met by the voice of a grumpy and superior sounding woman from one a major grocery retailing organisation. I explained that my colleague was away from her desk but I would happily take a message. Get her to call you. That sort of stuff (at least I was human and not some disembodied electronic voice).

And off she went. Launched into a very unhappy tirade. Have just received five faxes for five different people but all the same fax. Waste of time. Waste of paper. Waste of fax machine.

“We don’t appreciate all this unsolicited paper pouring into the office” was the tenor of her tirade.

Now, as it happens, I did have some sympathy with her concern. I am sure we could have done better and sent, perhaps, just one fax with a request that it be distributed to the five people concerned. I was about to share those thoughts with her but she hung up on me! She’d finished what she wanted to say - wasn’t interested in anything that I might say.

And then it occurred to me.

My mailbox at home is constantly stuffed to overflowing with unsolicited material from her company. Week in. Week out. All manner of poorly designed, badly produced junk is hurtled in our direction with no opportunity to easily stop the flow.

At least our material was from a named individual, was carefully targeted at the individuals concerned, had received their agreement for it to be sent to them and provided a clear opportunity, with name and number provided, for it to be discontinued if they so chose.

So why did this woman take on such a superior “we’re far too important to be bothered with this stuff” tone?

This is not an isolated incident. It is a recurring theme that we encounter in both the marketing of our own services as well as working with Clients on their marketing communications activity.

The age old wisdom of “do as you would be done by” doesn’t seem to apply in business.

And it manifests itself in a number of different ways.

Always expect others to answer their voice mail messages but don’t bother to offer them the same courtesy.

Target your prospects with as much promotional material as you can but get precious, superior and huffy when you receive any from them.

Send your Sales Teams on endless training to teach them how to get in the door, how to navigate past the gatekeeper (sales training-speak for Secretary), how to handle objections, how to close (whether the customer wants you to or not) but deploy the most rigorous defences yourself to ensure that a rep (obviously short for reptile) doesn’t get within a thousand paces of your own organisation.

Insist on regarding all attempts by anyone who might be wanting to do business with you as being scurrilous plots to penetrate your defences and interfere with your very important day and then head off to a meeting to develop your own strategies to do precisely that to them!

You know all the other examples yourselves. You encounter them on a daily basis.

Life as a Salesperson is tough enough without this set of double standards making it harder for them, consigning them to levels of rejection that any other part of their organisation simply can’t imagine.

Oh, and I’m not talking here about the type of sales activities that deserve to be rejected. That have every right to fail. About those activities that are poorly targeted, poorly implemented and seem to be driven by some weird notion about the numbers game – maximum stuff out, maximum business in, even if we irritate the hell out of hundreds of prospects along the way.

Professional sales people engaged in attempts to implement professional, targeted sales strategies are faced with this bunkum every day. Gatekeepers with Attila The Hun aspirations. Voice Mail messages never returned. Perpetual “he’s in a meeting” responses to calls. And an overall attitude to them that so often sends signals that they are regarded as some sort of lesser human being because they are, after all, just “reps”.

And so often this stuff is coming from businesses who, in another part of the building, are doing precisely the same thing themselves. Just trying to do business in an increasingly competitive and difficult world.

So the message has to be: Get off your high horse. Do as you would be done by.

And remember, as Adam Smith said, “Nothing happens until somebody sells something” so don’t be so precious when you encounter one of these Heroes & Providers – you’ve probably got some too. So offer any business that seeks to sell to you the same kind of respect you would like when selling to them. It’s a simple but powerful concept – nothing happens without it.

And we’ve just despatched a roll of fax paper to our prospect. Its only worth $4 and we wouldn’t want to be guilty of wasting too much of their resource.