As you may know, I have a link on my sidebar that will allow anyone to schedule a call with me. Most of the people that use it want to talk about a blog post that I wrote, get some free coaching, or talk about sales or how to sell better. Once upon a time, someone didn't fill in the agenda field and when I inquired as to the agenda, it became apparent that he was scheduling a sales call for himself. The call didn't happen and he went away.
Last week, somebody scheduled a call and used 501 words in the agenda to tell me how wonderful he was and propose, "I am contacting you to enquire if you are at the very least open to the notion of a 'partnership' as a sales/networker/'eyes-&-ears-to-the ground' person like yourself and cut you in on the budget."
I replied, "Thank you for the invitation, but I am not at all "open to the notion of a 'partnership' as a sales/networker/'eyes-&-ears-to-the ground' person". So, I have cancelled our call." and figured that we were done.
A while later, I noticed that he had looked at my LinkedIn profile after I had cancelled the call and that made me curious. So, I wrote, "When I cancelled the call that you scheduled, I figured that you'd go away thinking 'typical US toad'. But, then I noticed that you looked at my profile on LinkedIn and was curious as to why you didn't do that before you scheduled the call. It also makes me wonder how you found me and my calendar. Can you converse without pitching?"
He replied with another 269 words where he explained that he couldn't understand why I preferred inbound to outbound, nor what I offerred on my calls, "chit chat, consolation, the weather forecast?"
Enough, I actually received another thousand words from him spread over three emails which ended with him threatening me with his lawyer and him telling me to "go away and play".
So, let me close with these questions.
Are your email communications too long?
Are your email communications too pitchy?
Are you easily offended when someone doesn't show you 'proper respect' and do you get defensive, offensive or both?
I truly was curious as to how this guy found my calendar. It wasn't through LinkedIn because he didn't look at my profile until after. It must have been search. So, what did he search?
I guess that my major point is, "Hey, all you inbound marketers! There's still a lot of work to do!"