Re: ARGH! Please make it STOP!

[Jay Maynard <jmaynard@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, May 16, 2003 at 03:18:06PM +0100, Jamie Coles wrote:
> How does Global Maintech set out to acquire new business?

(For those who haven't visited my website, Global MainTech is my employer.
Well, one of them, now.)

They use the tradional methods of selling, ones that don't shift the costs
to the pottential customer: advertising in conventional media, personal
visits from salesmen, partnerships with other vendors that can get our name
in front of people who buy stuff. They do not spam, because they understand
that irritating one's potential customers is not a good way to generate
sales.

I had this discussion with a telemarketer last night. I signed up for
Minnesota's do-not-call list the day it opened, and yet I still get calls
due to Minnesota's porous law. (The law allows telemarketers to call if they
do not plan to complete the sale over the telephone. In the future, if I get
calls from such, I'm going to invite them to come to my house to discuss the
sale, where I will then tell them no.) He said, basically, that he continued
to call people who had expressed their desire not to get calls from
telemarketers because some might want to do business with him anyway.

I truly cannot understand the thinking of that kind of person. "Yes, they
don't want telemarketing, but they want *my* telemarketing!" Bah. It's even
worse for spam.

Film critic Roger Ebert wrote the Boulder Pledge a few years back in
response to spam. It states, "Under no circumstances will I ever purchase
anything offered to me as the result of an unsolicited e-mail message. Nor
will I forward chain letters, petitions, mass mailings, or virus warnings to
large numbers of others. This is my contribution to the survival of the
online community." I have taken the pledge, and hold to it religiously.

This has, by now, drifted off-topic for midrange-l. I'm cross-possting to
midrange-nontech, and hopefully, further discussion will happen there.