I wrote telemarketing software. Not sure if I'll go into the same circle of hell as telemarketers, or something worse. But it is an incentive to live as long as possible before going to my reward.
Ha, I write telemarketing support systems for a living and feel your pain. It might not be sexy work but sure helps to grease the wheels of commerce and put food on the table.
Telemarketing does not help grease the wheels of commerce. It helps grease the wheels of scamming.
Commerce is when people buy stuff they do need and that provides value to them. Telemarketing is conning people by pushing them to buy shit they never needed and that won’t provide any value to them. It is not commerce, it is scamming.
I’m not criticizing you for doing the necessary things to put food on the table, but please don’t justify it by saying it helps commerce.
You wouldn’t need “outbound sales” if you had a product that people wanted. They would be calling you with their wallets open if it was the case.
You only need outbound sales/scammers if you have a product that you think that people need even though they’ve been living without just fine for ages.
> Some of it is scams, plenty isn't.
Please give me some examples of how some are scams but plenty are not. From personal experiences it's always been the opposite for me. I feel like telemarketing is only used where the product/deal is so bad/unneeded that it wouldn't sell through normal, respectful channels, requiring the use of a telemarketer to put pressure onto the innocent victim to push them towards a purchase.
People aren't omniscient. People at best look for known unknowns, but not unknown unknowns. Particularly when it comes to tech, that covers a very broad area of things that they don't know are possible.
The idea that if you need to tell people about it for them to know about it and potentially buy it, then the offer is a scam, is baffling to me.
As for inbound leads, their existence doesn't stop outbound sales being productive. they're not mutually exclusive at all. In fact they're complimentary. Outbound sales results in customers, having customers creates awareness of product in the market, people that hear about it through those customers become inbound leads.
Regarding people living fine without the new product. You're just arguing against progress there. Which as a definite luddite and potential anarcho-primitivist, I am all for. But "scam" isn't a synonym for just "bad", and any definition that includes just creating needs would have to include most of modern commerce. Definitely including any and all software developers.
People are not yet omniscient, I agree. But lately there's this wonderful new tool called the Internet which allows people to become omniscient as far as product discovery is concerned.
If you have a product that solves problem X, make a website, blog posts, send samples to journalists for reviews, etc about how your product solves problem X, and let search engines & organic growth do the rest.
> You're just arguing against progress there
I'm not arguing against progress. I'm arguing against the (potential) progress of your wallet, which is not at all correlated with progress of humanity as a whole. Again, if a product was truly progress then organic growth would be more than enough. As far as your wallet is concerned, you can make it progress through other, less annoying means, and actually create value in the process.
I'm definitely getting the impression that you're just asserting that outbound sales is "bad" in some general sense rather than specifically that its use means the business is a scam.
Microsoft has one of the highest quality sales teams there is. Many of which are outbound focused. Do you consider Microsoft products to be scams?
Most (all?) silicon Valley b2b startups utilise outbound sales heavily. /r/sales is full of people either in or looking to get in to saas. It's basically only behind medical devices in preferred products to sell as a salesperson right now. Do you believe the majority of b2b software companies are scams?
If so, what is a scam to you?
Sorry for the clarification request, and I will assume good faith if you get back with a reasonable answer, but I just can't see how the lines of argument you're putting forward pertain to your original assertion.
Well every “outbound sales” interaction I had was bad, so that’s my reasoning for not liking them.
If I need something, I will search for it, read your website/marketing material and decide for myself. It is an automatic turn off if you call me first because you’d be taking my time, possibly interrupting me, and putting pressure on me to buy now that I otherwise wouldn’t have if I was evaluating the products myself.
> Microsoft has one of the highest quality sales teams there is. Many of which are outbound focused. Do you consider Microsoft products to be scams?
Define “high quality”. Is it high quality by conversion rate or is it by customer satisfaction, churn rate, etc? Because I too can build a “high quality” sales team by holding my future customers at gunpoint and achieving a 100% conversion rate.
While I don’t consider all Microsoft products to be scams, I definitely know a few that wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for clueless people being conned into buying it by salespeople or consultants.
> Most (all?) silicon Valley b2b startups utilise outbound sales heavily
And I guess this is why Oracle, IBM and similar shitty companies are still in business, because they rely on clueless people falling for their sales tactics instead of actually making great products.
> If so, what is a scam to you?
A scam is something I would fall for that I wouldn’t normally fall for if it wasn’t for pressure/ideas from an uninvited salesman/scam artist. So like if I evaluate your product and decide it’s not for me, and then fall for it because of a salesman playing with my emotions (technically that wouldn’t work on me, but a lot of life insurance telemarketers will for example use the “think of your family” aspect to get a sale) or similar, then I would consider it a scam. A legal scam, but a scam nonetheless.
I've got no great love for telemarketing or the advertising industry, but as a point of fact it's not true that if you make something people want they will seek you out to find it. If you make something that people want but do not make any effort to put it in front of them or argue for its merits, it will likely end up ignored and forgotten.
"They're just fine without it" is a pretty good counterargument, not just against marketing, but against speaking your mind, applying for a job, asserting yourself in any way, and the pursuit of science, knowledge, or advancement of any kind. If the status quo is good, it is only because someone improved it from what it was before. It can be improved again.
> it's not true that if you make something people want they will seek you out to find it
If you solve my problems I will find it, and I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one. You can't imagine the number of times I've searched Google or asked friends about solutions to problem X.
> do not make any effort to put it in front of them or argue for its merits
If your product solves problem X, make a website or blog posts explaining that and let Google do the rest. Post it to Product Hunt or Hacker News. Reach out to journalists/bloggers and offer them a sample for review. Even buy some ads - sure, ads are cancer and will be blocked on my side, but I still prefer them compared to telemarketing.
> it will likely end up ignored and forgotten
If your product is so revolutionary that you feel it's OK to interrupt people by calling them and trying to sell it to them, then this is not something you should worry about. Such a revolutionary product will become mainstream in a matter of days. ;)
If your product isn't that revolutionary, then maybe you should instead work on making it revolutionary instead of paying monkeys to spam people. And finally, if that still doesn't work, then remember that nobody is entitled to any business and that interrupting everyone else just so you can have it your way is still not right.
> is a pretty good counterargument, not just against marketing, but against speaking your mind, applying for a job, asserting yourself in any way, and the pursuit of science, knowledge, or advancement of any kind
Seems like this is a pretty good counter-argument to a bullshit marketing model as well. Why improve my marketing model if the status-quo is good (as long as it's not me getting spammed)?
Speaking your mind, applying for jobs and asserting yourself is something you can do by yourself without bothering anyone. This kind of bullshit marketing does bother everyone - I haven't met a single person yet who was happy to receive telemarketing calls - I think this says a lot about what you're preaching. ;)
How is it an innocent victim? Every company that I’ve worked for that sold B2B software had salespeople that had “regions” they sold into to get contracts. How are they anything but glorified telemarketers? I doubt any of our customers were “scammed” into buying services that cost tens of thousands a year.
While I’ve never bought anything from a telemarketer, it doesn’t mean that thier product is not legit.
If the customer comes first to you and gives you their contact then it’s no longer telemarketing IMO - at the very least not the usual definition of telemarketing which is “asshole spamming your phone to sell their snake oil”. But if you just call out of the blue, I don’t care whether what you sell is legit, it’s just not okay to waste my time - frankly the fact that your company uses these practices damages my opinion of your product already. I don’t do that to your company - don’t do it to mine.
Now I’m not sure how prevalent scams are in the B2B industry (although I would expect there are still a lot of salespeople preying on clueless people that would fall for marketing BS instead of actually evaluating the product), but in B2C, every telemarketing call I’ve received was a really bad deal at best (that a quick Google search would beat), and an outright scam at worst.
You should be more worried about the state of the economy if companies that can afford to buy services that cost six to seven figures annually that have to be approved by C-level people are so easily scammed.
Every B2B company that does large contracts that I’m aware of has sales people.
