shutdown

I can tell there’s been a new training program shift for B2B cold call telemarketers. They’re now all asking the same self-deflating question to me.

TYPICAL CALL

ME: Hello.

TM: Are you the person in the business responsible for buying snow blowers?! I’m selling snow blowers  Your business needs one now! (plus 30-45 seconds more of non-paused script which, frankly, I don’t have the energy to re-create here in this fictional exchange.)

ME: We’re not interested, thanks.

TM: Can I ask why not?

ME: It doesn’t snow here.

TM: Oh.

The sales seminar down at the airport Marriott would advise you to ask questions to overcome objections which I assume is where this question is coming from.

But the reality is that, in sales, you should never allow the opportunity to paint yourself into a corner. The same advice applies if you are an actual floor painter.

(Full disclosure: It actually does snow here.)

tainted

I’m seeing it happen more and more.

As the cashier hands me a receipt, she draws a circle on it and says, “Please visit this link and take the online survey about your experience. Please make sure to give me all 5s.”

I was staying in a hotel in Cincinnati the other night (in the “quiet zone”). On the desk in the room, there was a high quality printed piece that had instructions on how to complete the e-mail survey I would receive from the corporate parent of the hotel. The manager had written on these instructions to “give the hotel all 10s or your response won’t count”.

And I could go on with real-life examples as I’m sure you could as well.

This is either dumb or crooked or both.

Why even conduct the customer response if you or your employees are tainting the results? Customer surveys are shaky enough without meddling interference.

If you’re doing it to avoid hearing bad feedback, then grow a thicker skin before you run yourself out of business.

If your employees are scared of how you treat them because of surveys, try having them improve actual customer service instead of numbers on a spreadsheet.

By the way, these attempts to influence the election could backfire.

moving on from feedburner

I’ve been blogging for almost 8 years and FeedBurner was one of the first services I used. It was a great way to analyze, optimize, publicize, and monetize the RSS feed of a blog. But the recent rumblings of news about Feedburner are scaring me.

So I am slowly letting the Feedburner feed address sunset/die.

This means a couple of things for you:

• If you get my posts via email, I have already moved your subscription to the Subscribe2 plug-in for you. (You’re welcome.) The email may look different, but there are more options you can work with in your subscription. As always, there’ll be no spam and you can unsubscribe at anytime.
• If you’d like to subscribe via email, you can at the new subscription page at http://shotgunconcepts.com/subscribe.
• If you’re an old-school RSS person and get the blog via reader or other method, please make sure you’re subscribed to the site’s normal feed at http://shotgunconcepts.com/feed instead of the Feedburner one just in case Google dumps it in the river unexpectedly. The normal feed is still being redirected until I completely purge everywhere it’s posted. And I may keep it quietly in the background until Google kills it. (in an un-evil way, of course)