Have you received cold calls from Asian call centres and the caller calls themselves John Murphy, or David Jones? I have had quite a few and when they have said this I have questioned them about their heritage and where their mum and dad were born. Am I being racist? No I am simply pointing out to the caller that I don’t believe them.
This is a typical situation of marketing directors trying to be clever. Thinking maybe people will be more receptive and have conversations with Asian cold callers if we call them an English name!
I for one find this MORE annoying, intrusive and deceptive than them using their real names.
Let me set the record straight. I am not a big fan of telesales companies (in fact there is only one I have ever found that I recommend to clients) equally I am not a big fan of telesales as a way of winning new business. As part of a co-ordinated marketing push where the potential client is approached in many ways, telesales being just one, I find it can work extremely well. But as a standalone way of winning new business! I cannot think of a more rude and disrespectful method.
In my mind if my business means so little to the company for them to think that they can simply call me and win it, then I wouldn’t wish to work with them anyway. It is the same as spam email an irritant you wish you could get rid of. In fact I’ve often thought it would be great to find the telephone number of the people who set these campaigns up and for recipients of these annoying calls to able to call them all night just to make a point, but then that might just be me!
I’ve found some companies go even further and simply hit you with a recorded message where you have to press a button to speak to someone. Add to that the fact that they typically call at about 7.00pm just when I am about to sit down to eat and you can start to see why this is such a cheap and dirty and in my opinion non-effective way of marketing.
Why any business would see this as a good spend of their marketing budget I have no idea. Cheap is cheap but effective is effective and this definitely isn’t effective.
So what am I trying to say? Maybe it is simply to say to any company looking at telesales as a process, don’t. It doesn’t work. You want proof? When was the last time you brought something from a cold call?
Use it as part of a process where you try and create a relationship and cold calls can be effective but even then typically you are looking at quite a few calls to build the relationship at which point it is better to bring the calls in house as that is where you want the relationship to be based.
As a side issue the next time I get an Asian telesales caller calling me and telling me their name is David Jones I’m going to tell them that my name is Rashid Patel. That should stump them.
