1. Be Dishonest About How You Got Your Lead’s Contact Information - Normally people don’t respond well to telemarketers calling them during the middle of the day; however, since I make my contact information publicly available on Marketing Ninja’s “about” page, I get calls occasionally.

   The marketer on the phone told me that he retrieved my contact information from Marketing-Ninja.com, which is plausible given that my cell number used to be listed on the “about” page before I edited it today.

   However, the marketer on the phone asked if I wanted to use my vanderbilt.edu email address to establish an account, which I don’t list anywhere on the site. It is available in my resume, which is hard to find, and I prominently display my gmail.com address all over the about page. The marketer also had my billing address, which I have never listed anywhere on Marketing Ninja, ever.

   This leads me to believe that my contact information was purchased by this advertising agency from another service that I subscribed to earlier, probably another advertising network. If you’re going to contact potential leads then you need be honest about where you acquired their contact information - if you’re buying client lists from other advertising networks and don’t want to own up to it then you probably should not be doing it in the first place.

   Any customer worth having will never do business with someone who starts the business relationship by lying to them.

2. Speak Without Understanding Your Lead’s Business Needs - One of the first questions that this marketer asked me was “so how much inventory do you carry?” I was confused at first because the marketer had told me that he had looked at my site and found my contact information on it, but if that were true, wouldn’t he know that Marketing Ninja is a blog and that I don’t have any physical inventory?

   If you’re asking questions about the nature of my business in order to tailor your services to my needs, you should at least do enough preliminary research to determine what it is I do.

3. Don’t Clarify Your Value Offering - I’m still not sure if they want me to buy advertising from them or if they want to pay me to run advertising on my own site. Given the dubious nature of that “inventory” question from earlier, my guess is that they initially wanted me to buy advertising - after I clarified what Marketing Ninja does, however, the conversation changed course towards running advertising on Marketing Ninja. This is what I think, any way - I’m still not actually sure what this firm wants to do with me.

   Make sure your customer knows what the hell you’re trying to sell - if the lead can’t determine what your service or product does, they are not going to buy it.

4. Don’t Follow Through - Towards the conclusion of my phone call with the marketer, he asked me what a good login name and password would be; he came up with a sample username and password for me to try out and told me I would receive a follow-up email with that information in it.

   I got the email, but when I checked it, all it had in it was a URL to the login page with ZERO information about my username and password. How would I be able to log in if the marketer came up with a different username/password combination or if I couldn’t remember it? The answer is: I wouldn’t.

   In addition I was supposed to receive a follow-up phone call today to discuss the service - it’s the end of the business day here on the west coast, and the firm is based on the east coast. Looks like that follow-up phone call didn’t happen.

   If you say you’re going to follow-up, then do it! If you do follow-up do it in a way that makes it easy for the lead to access information about your value offering, and make it convenient!

5. Get It Wrong - Luckily I have a good memory and I remembered the exact user name and password that I discussed a day ago with the marketer over the phone; I logged in and to my delight I see a welcome message tailored to me “welcome Arron Stannard!” My name is spelled Aaron Stannard, and the email address that the marketer used had my name full name spelled correctly in it!

   This wasn’t just a typo - this was the last straw. I’m not going to deal with someone who is dishonest, ignorant of my business needs, and apparently sloppy.

   If you’re going to reach out to potential leads, make sure you put your effort into the small things too, like how their names are spelled; typos are one thing, but being unable to copy and paste someone’s name correctly from their email address is another.

These 5 ways to go wrong all seem obvious, but this experience has shown me that these “obvious” no-nos need to be reiterated.