February 22nd, 2013

Chad Dickerson, like many of us that run companies, gets a lot of solicitation via email. Some good. Most bad. He decided to do something useful with his response to one:

I decided to write him back with some advice. I’m publishing my response on the hope that it will help salespeople produce better pitches (which will thereby reduce the number since they will have to be more thoughtful), and saving that, maybe my post will provide some cathartic commiseration to all of the other people who I know face a similar barrage of unqualified pitches every day (and I won’t even get into the cold phone calls).

I can not even begin to put a number on how many unsolicited pitches I’ve gotten via email over the years. Hundreds if not thousands. Most of them are pretty terrible. One or two per year are for products I genuinely need or will need in the future. But the process itself, whether or not the product being solicited is good or not, is old and busted and really needs to be done away with.

Chad’s advice is right on the money, of course, in that these inside sales people really should do a little research before they decide to email an executive out of the blue. Otherwise it is lazy and the email becomes borderline spam.