Calling all Industrial Marketers and Salespeople - STOP COLD CALLING

-
Nobody likes cold calling. Cold calls are uncomfortable for the sales people making them and they are uncomfortable for the prospective customers that receive them. If this is true why do some sales and marketing professionals do it?

Here at Inventables we consider cold calls to be a form of what Seth Godin might refer to as interruption marketing. Seth actually wrote a book on Permission Marketing during his days at Yahoo! At Inventables we think about this choice from the prospective of people who use our site everyday to find new materials for their projects - product developers.

Product developers have a love hate relationship with interruption marketing. They love learning about new possibilities. Learning about new materials and technologies is essential for everyone working on new product development. When they learn about a new material like synthetic paper it expands their understanding of what's possible. With this new understanding, they can create an innovation or product feature that is new to their customers like a waterproof book. These same people can't get any work done during the day because they are constantly being interrupted by phone calls and meetings. Corporations are concerned too, Microsoft commissioned a study to determine how long it takes their employees to get back to the task they were working on after they were interrupted. They found it takes their workers on average 15 minutes to get back into the task after they were interrupted.

We hope the new Inventables Marketplace will put an end to cold calls product developers receive. If industrial marketers use our site to clearly describe their products then they will get inbound sales leads worth their time and spend their days going deeper with each potential customer rather than spending time on the phone making random introductions.

Comments

Leigh said…
hear hear! totally agree. thank you inventables.
12/16/2009 6:27 PM
Anonymous said…
Opulently I agree but I about the brief should have more info then it has.
12/28/2009 5:33 AM
Alexander said…
I have my own company and need to cold call to get business. If done properly then I think it can be very effective.
1/08/2010 6:56 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Cold calls are ruining the world

-
One of our motivations for launching the new Inventables Marketplace was to end cold calls. In our view cold calls are ruining the world. We hope our new website puts an end to cold calls. The reason we think cold calls are bad is they interrupt productive work. Most engineers that work in product development wish they had more time to work on designing their product. They often find themselves in back to back to back meetings and when they finally get back to their desk the phone starts ringing. We hope that Inventables Marketplace will be so effective at connecting vendors with new customers they will spend time educating the world about their products by creating and updating product profiles like this one for Overmolding with Plasma Treatment rather than cold calling prospective customers and interrupting their work.
Read more

Oneth1ng - From Inventables Labs

-
Inventables fosters a culture of innovation. We think of innovation in the same way gardeners think about growing beautiful flowers. You can't "build" a beautiful flower you just need to set up the right conditions. Nutrient rich soil, water, sunlight, seeds, and patience will eventually yield nice flowers. At Inventables we provide an exploration budget , we give our agile teams free point Friday to work on whatever THEY think is most important. We're proud to announce that our software engineering team used Free Point Friday to create a digital tool to help Agile teams with their standups each morning. The app is free and is called Oneth1ng . It helps your team track the most important thing you want to get done every day. If you don't work in an agile software development process but you are the kind of person that likes to focus on one thing at a time you might want to check it out too.
Read more

Lamp Design Project: Day 1

-
Image
Hello, I would like to introduce a small design project to the inventables blog. A documentation of the collaboration between two young designers; myself, Daniel Schaumann, and my roommate, Federico Rios. Fed and I are coming together to tackle one of the most iconic and tested product categories, the lamp. We will be blogging every day for a few weeks to document or progress through our design process. From research, to ideation, through concept creation, prototyping and delivering a finished product; we will be sharing our every step. We hope to make this as exciting for you, our viewers, as it is for us as designers. Let us know what you think. Enjoy! Day 1: Today, Federico and I wanted to gain a perspective on the current product landscape. We searched popular blogs, online retailers, forums, etc.. for lamps that peeked our interest, noting material and construction choices as well as function and overall form. We found inspiration in everything from high tech, premium market prod
Read more