Fingers crossed the FTC finds and fines you. If it’s big enough maybe you’ll have some empathy for your victims, or at least the calculus will change in society’s favor.
If the law is so far divorced from what everyday people see as a scourge, then perhaps it is the law that has a poor understanding of reality. Just because bothering people is legal doesn't mean it's ethical.
I think you might be projecting a wee bit too much.
I guess you missed the following quote in the article I linked to (emphasis mine):
“Only 2% of cold calls convert. But 69% of buyers are willing to take a cold call, and 57% of C-level buyers want sales reps to contact them first.”
Most savvy business people are willing to take speculative engagements (within reason) — it’s just +ev to do so.
Let me be charitable and say that I think that a lot of tech sales is low quality (e.g., trying to force fit when there isn’t much/any) or downright scams (e.g., the alleged yelp “protection money” gambit), so I can understand that a tech-oriented community may be a bit jaded. That said, low quality sales interactions are not the norm in large swathes of the economy — it’s just as much or more of a waste of time for the sales person as it is for the potential buyer.
1. I don't trust the biased source of that number.
2. I want to know exactly how they asked the question, and how "contact them first" was interpreted by the people being surveyed.
3. Were your cold calls going directly to C-level buyers?
4. If 69% of buyers are willing to take a cold call, why do you think only 30% of people answered the phone, of which only a third were willing to listen to a pitch?
1. Fair enough. Do you think it’s far from directionally correct?
2. Very good question. I go back to, do you think it’s far from directionally correct? I think it’s close.
3. Small business owners ($1-10 million annual revenue).
4. Great question. First, many of these folks do like I do and send non-contacts to voicemail (they’re busy). Second, I clearly stated who I was, what my company did, and the specific problem of theirs that I wanted to solve. I’m guessing that a healthy chunk of that delta was just folks for whom my offering was not a hair on fire problem, so they didn’t call back (few people answered directly, most were call backs). There was probably a small percentage of wrong number, closed/closing business, etc.
Note that I was selling a technical service to a mostly non-technical crowd, so they really had no desire to do research. Most of the folks really seemed to appreciate talking to someone who could answer their questions in a way they could understand (e.g., saying something “loads slowly” rather than “is bloatware”). My goal was always to do a few things: 1) help them understand what they needed and tell them the verbiage they needed to use to ask for it, 2) to determine if we offered what they needed, and 3) if we were not a good fit, let them know what I thought were good fits. I also tried to give some free advice on easy wins like how to get good GBP reviews (with a cheat sheet if they wanted it).
I got a not small number of referrals from folks who didn’t sign up with us but referred their acquaintances to us due to the positive, but not closed, sales experience they had with me/us.
1-2, I don't know enough about small business owners to have a firm guess, but I'm definitely suspicious and I treat this as very weak information.
As for the rest I'm at least glad you're finding a good number of people you're making happy. But it doesn't sound like your experience would be an outlier in getting fewer listeners compared to other legitimate sales, so that still suggests to me that those survey numbers are wrong or very misleading.
