If you purchase from cold outreach, you’re condoning their behavior

As with most of you, I get hit with cold outreach all the time. Cold emails, phone calls, LinkedIn connections, people at our door, etc. While they may occasionally have decent offers, my rule on cold outreach has become very simple — no.

Last week I had someone stop by our house to sell us a new roof. It was admittedly bad timing (I was on a call, and our dog was going nuts), but it helped me come up with a nice phrase to quickly get him to go away: “ We don’t purchase from companies that do business this way. “

If you need to interrupt my day to insert your sales pitch, there is a 0% chance I’ll purchase from you. It’s kind of nice to have that set rule, as it saves me a bit of time because I don’t need to evaluate the offer at all. It’s just “no”.

Ads

Proper advertising is a bit different, as it’s part of the deal. If I’m watching live TV, I know there will be commercials and I have no problem with it. I know which podcasts insert ads, and I’m ok with the decision to continue to listen to them. If I perform a search on Google, I know that there will be (ever more…) ads on the top. I’ve accepted that deal and companies that play into those ecosystems are fine by me.