Would You Buy From Anonymous?

A short while back I was undertaking some sales development work for a client and as part of the assignment I undertook to build them a specific target list of CEOs and business owners in the services sector; generally small to medium sized businesses whose Unique Selling Proposition centres on their service quality and customer relationships.

As the results came back from my initial telephone and internet trawl, I was astounded to see the number of service businesses adopting a 'no names' policy! Now if you are the CEO of a large pharmaceutical company with links to organisations who do animal testing, I can readily understand why your company might be reticent about handing out the CEO's name and telephone number - but a services business?

Intrigued by this phenomenon, I dug a bit deeper. Not only did 30% of businesses not want to give out names on the telephone, but also not once did the young lady (usually) on the other end of the line ask if I was either an existing customer or a prospective new one. So here was a service or sales opportunity lost, not to mention the possibility that I was a disgruntled customer with a problem to resolve – or it seems in a large number of companies, not resolve.

I then had a deeper look at a sample of the companies' web sites; not one web site from this group had any personal contact details on at all – I might as well have been trying to contact Martians for all the human presence available. The contact details supplied ranged from the usual anonymous 'info@', to 'sales@', 'enquiries@' which we see frequently, to perhaps the least appealing I have ever seen – 'accounts@'! I understand that people are concerned about spam or unwanted calls from over eager sales people but these can be easily prevented. Personally I like calls from sales people, particularly the good ones as they provide valuable learning experiences.

This leads me back to one of the principal lessons I learned early in my sales career. 'People buy from people'. OK, I know e-commerce is a big deal these days and we should all exploit the power of the web to ease our sales processes. But if you are truly proud of whom you are, what you do, and the customers you serve surely you should at least put your names out there on the website? The best practice sites put photos of the owners, directors, or principal managers too. The only differentiator many service businesses have is the quality of their service and the personal knowledge and contact with their customers – so flaunt it! Make yourself known! Would you buy a business critical service from someone who wouldn't give out their name? Neither would I.