Yes, it can hurt to “just ask”

You’ve heard the phrase “it can’t hurt to ask”, and while that’s true in many situations, putting it out as a blanket statement can lead to some bad things.

A great example is spam, whether that’s via email, phone calls, or things like LinkedIn connections. In every case, they figure “it can’t hurt to ask”, but collectively, it certainly can. Thousands of companies, each spamming millions of people, creates a mess of stuff that we all need to work through each day. I’ve mentioned before that spam makes it harder for the good stuff to shine, and we recently had a vivid example of this at GreenMellen.

The voicemail

Our voicemail gets a lot of spam. We filter through it quickly and respond to legitimate calls, but there is a lot to work through. Our clients get our personal phone numbers, but the published number for the company is voicemail only due to the amount of garbage that comes through.

Last week, we got a voicemail that essentially said “ This is Steve. Please call me back at 111–222–3333 “. I’ve seen that before; with no context around it, Steve is absolutely wanting to try to sell us something, so I ignored it. I was wrong. He left another message a few days later with a bit more info, I called him back, and we had a wonderful conversation. I apologized for not calling more quickly, as that was…