In Carol’s recent post on entrepreneur.com, “Want My Business? Don’t Lie to Me,” she shares some examples where people wanting to connect with her mentioned situations that never happened – oops!
That’s not the way to make a good first impression, or to initiate a conversation. Carol begins:
“All relationships are built on trust, including business relationships. Trust is a very fragile thing — it takes a long time to earn and one misstep can break it forever. Given the importance of trust, it amazes me that there is a trend (or maybe a trend re-emergence) among salespeople that runs completely counter to trust — lying.
Recently, I have been getting a barrage of emails filled with blatant untruths. For example, a few weeks ago, I was an expert speaker at a Silicon Valley tech conference, focusing on how to market to small businesses. My email address, which as a speaker is usually not distributed, was given out to attendees. I got many form emails about meeting at the event (one, embarrassingly, from a person who I already knew). Then, I received one from a salesperson who said I had met his colleague (I didn’t) to discuss cloud solutions for my business (I didn’t) and he wanted to follow up and discuss it further.
It was pretty obvious that he had taken my information from registration, because I used my holding company name for registration, which is not something that I talk about in day-to-day business.”
What can you do instead? Carol shares some tips in the rest of the post here.
