Dear Marketing Businesses

A trade show is a great way to identify businesses that provide services in a particular field, such as woodworking, or for contractors/tradesmen etc.  They spend quite a bit of money setting getting the space, setting up a stand, and manning it for the days of the show.

Yellow Pages to their credit did the same, so when I got a call from them earlier, I wasn’t surprised, but they had also paid their dues.

To all the other marketing companies (etc) out there that have paid a whole $10 to attend the show just to get a new list of companies to try to cold call and sell your products and services to: at least have the courtesy of doing some research of the company/business/website you are calling before trying to sell your products.

From the number of calls I have received (and I never got one after the Working with Wood Show fwiw) in the last couple of days, not one of you bothered to even look at the website before cold-calling me – you had no idea what this website is about, or that there isn’t any advertising on the site, or even that I don’t sell any products.

For the Yellow Pages specifically, I never did get an answer to my question when you rang: why would I spend $500 to get my URL into your pages, when the best you were able to offer was about 4200 people who look at that section on the web in a year?  I get that much traffic in 3 – 4 days.

Companies attend shows to get their products out there to the buying public.  I doubt one of them attends in the hopes they will get seen by a non-proactive marketing company.  If cold-calling (without researching) is the best strategy you use to market your business, what on earth makes you think that you’ve displayed enough competence & initiative to market mine?