Oooh, I hate getting those sales calls at work. Do you? I hung up on someone just a few hours ago, and I'm still disturbed. There was so much that I wanted to say to the young woman who was pushing me to buy her company's service, but I didn't say anything. I sensed that whatever I said to her would be taken as a sign of weakness, and spit back to me in the form of a sales pitch. Here goes anyway. What I wanted to say:
Dianne, I believe you probably have a pretty good service to sell me. It might be an improvement over my current arrangement. Your price was reasonable, but I will not buy from you. Not today, not tomorrow. I'm sorry about that because I can tell by how assertive and persistent you are that you could use the money. I can tell from your voice that you're probably in your late 20's and you're calling me all the way from New York. That's an expensive place to live, and you're in a job that is commission-based. If you don't sell, you don't make much.
But, I won't buy from you for two reasons. First, you followed some sort of script to sell me your service. You were doing something to me, not with me -- communicating at me, not with me. We weren't working on the same problem. Your problem was that you needed a sale. My problem is that I needed to improve my daily work. You never bothered to ask how I would use your service. Did I have any problem with my current arrangement? When I mentioned that I could probably get better service from a local competitor of yours, what I meant was that people in my local community don't talk in the language of sales script. If I have a problem, I talk with them, and we solve it as best we can. I'm fairly certain that if I had a problem with your company, I'd soon have another scripted interaction with someone, and I just can't stand wasting my time with a human who's programmed like a telephone answering machine.
My second reason for not buying your company's service is a bit harder to explain. I know the arguments you so skillfully made on behalf of your company were solid. I concede victory to the person who designed your marketing scheme. You had a logical answer to each of my objections. But, if I bought your services, I would be supporting a way of doing business that I find distasteful. I'd be saying, it's okay to treat people as a means to an end, just as long as both sides make or save a few dollars. It's not okay with me -- and although your company may deserve an A+ for its service, it fails the test that really matters -- it's not based on respect for the individuals or organizations that would use your service.
Dianne, you're young, and even though the economy is tough right now, do yourself a favor and get a better job. It might pay less -- but it's much better to do something useful than it is to use people.
