A Brief Tale of Sleaze

Unless you are new to this blog (welcome, by the way) you have already noticed that I am a professional speaker, among other things. And, like any business person, I like my phone to ring – especially when it’s a lead.

Friday I got the following message via Google Voice:  ”Good afternoon, Rob, My name is Ulysses and I’m looking to work with a professional speaker. I can be reached at 888-860-4470 extension 725. I look forward to speaking to you soon bye-bye.”

As soon as I heard the message my bullshit detector started to go off.

It was odd that he left no company name.

It was odd that he mentioned nothing about a group, association, conference, or any ‘referred by’ information.

Immediately I Googled the phone number and discovered that it was from a company called Leapfish and, according the their site, they are:  a multi-dimensional search aggregator that retrieves results from several of the top search portals, including Google, Yahoo, Live Search, Blogs, Videos, Shopping and other popular search engines.

At this point I should mention that as cynical as I can be, I really do like to give folks the benefit of the doubt – that and I certainly don’t want to miss a business opportunity.

Under the category of ‘long shot’ I thought, “Perhaps the company is having a sales meeting and needs a speaker”.

Then that nagging bullshit detector went off again.

But I called Ulysses back.

Sure enough, as I heard the drone of a busy phone room buzzing in the background, Ulysses explained that he was calling to see if I wanted to secure a top three spot for the search term “professional speaker”.

I explained to him that calling under the pretext of inquiring about ‘working with a speaker’ is deceptive and a poor way to interest me in ad placement.

At this point he told me that the placement was not pay per click but should be thought of as “an investment”.

What?

It was at this point I asked to speak to his boss.

Brian came on the line and apologized and explained that Leapfish had no interest in deceptive sale practices because “their numbers were growing every month”.

Gee, thanks Brian.

Attention sleazy sales people: there is only one surefire way to sell.

It is the upfront, honest, put your cards on the table approach.

Virtually any other method cheapens you, your product, your brand, and will ultimately result in more relationship harm than good.

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tagged as coaching, customer service, LeapFish, management, sales, sleazy sales, transparency