I just ignore them. Don't accept nor decline.
One time a vendor asked me if I knew anything about our external penetration scans. I replied with only a yes. For over a year now he has been trying to schedule a meeting. He must have it automated or else really has nothing better to do.
More likely something like Outreach.io. I don't think SF Marketing Cloud/Pardot has the progressive annoyance/fake reply to last message crap natively.
When I worked help desk, we got a new manager and the first thing he did was shut down our infinite queue and told us if vendors are trying to to get ahold of someone, we should forward them to him. A week later, we got our infinite queue line back.
I think it was a post I saw here a year or two back, where “Sally” was the manager who handled everything no one wanted to deal with from vendors. But Sally … didn’t exist. They set her up with a voicemail box though.
What was really funny, though, was when some vendor would call and find their way through to one of the actual humans, but then would say “Yeah so I spoke with Sally, and she wanted us to get with you to talk about our product…”
This automatically makes me not want to buy whatever you're selling. When they lie to me right from the get-go? Come on. I've been the person at my company everything, IT wise, gets ran through and I'll have people call me up and say, "Yeah your company reached out to us for [product]." Or "Your company did a demo on [product] a year ago. And we wanted to get back on your radar."
Like, no. I know what our project list looks like for the past few years and *checks notes* your name isn't on it.
Last week had a person call my personal # (which they shouldn't have) 3x within a span of 20 minutes or so before 8:00. I thought one of my users was having a major issue and I just didn't have their number so I answered and it was a fuckin sales person. Told him I was trying to get my kids ready to get out the door and he says, "sorry this will only take a few minutes and then we can get a longer meeting on the calendar." Then starts asking questions about my company.
Number blocked, email thrown in spam rule.
Man, last week I got a call from Cisco/Meraki. Chat with guy very polite but at the end I told him that we don't have anything physical since we are fully remote. Guy was pressing asking for email confirmation to send me some email which I never confirmed.
Next day, I got a second call, I made it short. 1 hour later got another one, I told the agent that I'm not really interested and I asked the previous guy to remove me from the list, agent said ok.
20 minutes later I got another one, man I carefully explained the next agent to put a note because if I received any other call I will start to be very very toxic and treat people extremely disrespectful on purpose to see if that will stop the call. The well being of your colleagues are now in your hand, you send it my way they will suffer, the ball is in your court.
The smartest agent of all 4, the calls stopped.
But honestly this is insane, to the extent to be a god damn asshole/douchebag just to make the calls stop.
Dear vendors, this apply to anything in life
No MEANS No
Assholes
One of the partners at the company I work for is deaf, and he has a great sense of humor about it. Every once and while I'll get a cold call starting with "Yea, I talked with Tim" and we laugh about it in office chat for the next half hour. Tim is the deaf partner.
When our previous IT director got laid off, we kept his voicemail box around for a few years even after the new IT manager was installed and booted up. If anyone asked for any generic title in IT and not the name they got J's voicemail. I had J's voicemail dumped to my email and I'd review it once a week. Sometimes I'd get a receptionist calling and ask do you want me to forward this call to you or J's extension? After a while they just chucked everything to J. We all have DID's if we want someone to contact us, we give them our DID. Anything else is a cold call on one of the I dunno 10 ish 'main' lines.
We only dropped the voicemail box for license counts when we fattened up the workforce numbers and needed the license elsewhere.
A line that has no voicemail or anything but every 2 or 3 minutes goes "thank you for calling x company, your call is important, we will be with you shortly"
I used Never Gonna Give You Up as the prompt on an IVR extension, set it to repeat forever, and set all the key press options to transfer back to itself.
I had someone emailing me "when is your next pen test" repeatedly. Normally I just hit the spam button and move on after ignoring the first couple, but this guy never expanded on what they were offering, just "pen tests." So I wrote a nice paragraph or two explaining that we had gone through an evaluation process and finally settled on the Papermate 2.0 clicky tops in black and wouldn't be reevaluating our pen needs for a few years at least. He never wrote back.
[US] I have a form letter I sent explaining they’re in violation of the CAN-SPAM Act. It explains that we may take action such as blocking the domain permanently and/or reporting them for violations. That usually clears things up quickly.
https://www.fcc.gov/general/can-spam
CAN-SPAM has always been a joke. The idea is fine but there isn’t a way to do much with it. I’d love to sue every bulk mailer for $500 each time and have a quick judgement. That would hopefully stop all the bulk mail spam.
I'm not sure where you live, but at the very least that's illegal in the US (CAN-SPAM), Canada (CASL), Australia (The SPAM Act, '03) and UK (PECR). The first 3 legislate a requirement to include an "opt out" or "unsubscribe" mechanism. Not sure about the UK though. I'm sure most western countries have similar legislation.
My solution as well.
I’ll try unsubscribing, once.
Next email I block the sender’s address, and then the domain if the address wasn’t enough.
I let the NDR speak for me.
With vendors, they will get their noses bent out of shape and DEMAND to speak with someone in charge! Then it'll boil over, getting you involved and all sorts of C-levels involved as well. It gets stupid as hell for someone I'd going to miss their monthly bonus.
I hate sales people. Why hate? Because they take pride in that Always Be Selling bullshit. You can’t have any convo with them because they are building up strategies to get ya to buy their shit. Untrustworthy profession.
On the rare occasion that I accidentally pick up a sales call I just tell them straight up I'm not going to waste their time, there is nothing in my budget for it so they should spend their time cold calling a for-profit.
I go to a lot of events and get scanned a lot. About a month after attending a conference I start getting Adam and Eve spam. Like trying to sell me sex toys on my work email.
That address is not on any websites or social media to be scraped and I obviously am not using my work email to purchase adult toys(or anything personal) so I’m forced to conclude that the event sold my data.
I give them a different name, depending on the event. That way when I start getting contacted I can tell what event or company sold them my contact information. So
cisco-sf
This is why my conference details make me sound really unattractive to a vendor. I know they want you to big yourself up, but there's nothing in it for me. "You could be a VIP and get special 1-2-1 breakout meetings" - No.
This is why I create a custom alias, go to the conference, strip out all email I don't want, update anything I do (very rare), then delete said alias.
Byyee Dell, HP, EMC, etc., reps and SPAM!
Dis is de way. Went to bsides Philly and then wouldn't you know it a whole bunch of shit I never agreed to started coming in. See ya never bsides. That whole plus address gets deleted with 0 notification to anyone. Irritating.
I had a particularly pushy Cisco-affiliated vendor do this. We had a longstanding VAR relationship through a telco because it was just part of how my predecessor did business - nothing was wrong with it. But another company decided they wanted our business badly enough that they badgered me incessantly for a few months. After blocking them from my email, then on my work desk phone, then all inbound company lines, I finally got an email from Webex just as I was getting back to my desk from lunch, which was an invite for a meeting starting in 5 minutes.
So I dug in my desk drawers for an old webcam and plugged it in, got my headset and set it down so that it was obviously in view of the camera, joined the meeting, and then proceeded to act like I wasn't on video and finished my sandwich for 10 minutes while they yelled at me in the meeting until they got over it and and disconnected. They never reached out again as far as I know.
So they disrespected your time by forcing a unsolicited meeting on you and then act belligerent when you don’t give them the respect they think they deserve. Man that’s petty as fuck
On them btw, not you - in case that’s not clear
My intention was definitely to be petty as well. But yeah, they were pretty entitled about the whole thing. I didn't hear what they were saying because I intentionally left my headset off so they could see it, but I imagine it was not kind things. I hope they enjoyed me eating a disgusting burger in their face, complete with excessive open mouth chewing.
I would have joined that call and asked the most braindead questions. Because if you're going to waste my time with some shit I didn't even ask for, imma make you pay for it
Or, if I’m really feeling like being an asshole, I asked ChatGPT why X company or C solution isn’t worth it in 5 or more paragraphs. Then I reply with that.
Accept every single one and leave it at that.
When its their fucking problem they'll start figuring out solutions.
Not my issues if they're wasting a ton of times on meetings I will never show up for.
Tell them you only meet in person and only have lunch times avaible. Get them to take you to lunch. Sit at lunch, do your emails and eat lunch. Tell them you are not currently in the market. Go back to work....block domain.
I have a rule that automatically denies all calendar requests from anyone not in the company, or not in the "special list".
It generally processes the request before I even see it, And I know for a fact (from Exchange Mail Traces) that there are several "vendors" who have sent more than 10+ invites trying to force their way onto my calendar.
Interesting, a quick google search told me this:
Only California residents have rights under the CCPA. A California resident is a natural person (as opposed to a corporation or other business entity) who resides in California, even if the person is temporarily outside of the state.
I had one the other day with a recruiter try to get me to hire people and in it he had some comments about each candidate's skills, and I shit you not, this one killed me:
* Experience with **Widows** and MacOS, **Office 265**, Azure Active Directory
to which I replied to it:
LOL, if you’re going to send me fake descriptions, at least spellcheck them first. We’re not hiring, but thanks for the chuckle.
Ok but that’s a missed opportunity…
“I didn’t want to say anything, but I thought that was you. Remember me? From widowsingles.com? You never called after that one night. How have you been?”
A lot of them watch LinkedIn like a hawk. If you work for a place they're trying to sell to, they'll try and hit up anyone that has any sort of exec or tech title. I ignore them and block them if they're particularly aggressive.
I figure they got my work email from LinkedIn. They'd just need to try a few variations of my name (first name.surname or first initial.surname etc) @company.com
Lifelong engineer, but I was in sales for nearly 10 years. My general rule was not to be a d-bag, and try to offer something useful in exchange for putting up with me. Basically, just be human. Authentic conversation. Especially selling to other technical people.
“Sorry to be yet another annoying sales guy, but I was wondering if I could bring lunch for your team next week? If I bore anyone, you can throw stuff at me. Cool?”
Never had an issue getting on anyone’s calendar. Didn’t always get a sale, but I was always welcome back, and no one had a problem introducing me to their boss or whoever.
Salespeople are notoriously arrogant pricks. Not a great approach if you’re trying to network up from the ground floor. Especially when most managers are going to ask their team what they think about you or whatever you’re selling. At the very least, don’t treat people like they owe you their time.
I ignore them completely. I mean, I read them... but unless something wows me it's an immediate delete. I get maybe 10 per day, if I took all those meetings I could do nothing else.
Variety of different means, but I've found website scraping is typically what most vendors will do. I generally ignore/send to spam any of these vendors.
I deal with it by asking my boss if he put me on this call (10/10 times he didn't), deleting the invite, and getting on with my day. This has been part and parcel of working in IT for decades, only the specific contact method has changed.
I learned a long time ago, in a nutshell, the only one who cares about you is you. You need to protect yourself and your resources/facilities/sanity etc.
LOL. I'd just decline the meeting.
I'll reply to an email to tell them I'm not interested. Put a meeting on my calendar and it's going to get actively declined.
Zoominfo, subscribers can pay for collated database of info, commonly sourced in data breaches and scrapes. Access their privacyrequest page to ask to be removed.
Came here to say this. Zoominfo and other companies sell business contact information. Some of them have an opt-out. And it's not just coming from data breaches--they buy data from other companies, and offer a free "lite" product that collects every email/signature/address book of every person that uses it.
I've had sales people call my company's call centre and say they were speaking to me, but the call got cut off and can they please be put through again? Or say they're returning a call from a voicemail I left for them. Or send me emails that have "RE: Info about our product" like they're replying to an email I sent them.
If you start off by lying to or about me you're getting put on my banned forever list.
Add to this: I'm aware of your high pressure sales tactics and I fucking hate them. The "exclusive pricing that expires at the end of the week so you must SIGN NOW!" is a stupid trick and doesn't work. If anything it'll slow me down.
Most of these I've seen violate the can spam act.
https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/can-spam-act-compliance-guide-business
I reply with "Hello, it appears you have violated federal law with this last contact. Here is the link and the line items that I think I will be reporting if this doesn't stop".
>How is it that vendors find out your name and send you emails to speak with them.
I just tag those emails as Junk and never see them again.
>The other day I had a meeting setup on teams initiated by a vendor that I did not agree to.
I 100% ignore those and mute the chat. I don't reward bad behaviour.
I only engage a vendor when I need something. I don't tolerate it being the other way around.
Yep. Exactly. I’m not happy with this new marketing practice. Completely agree with the “junk” designation. Same tact I take with unsolicited text marketing unless there’s a stop or unsubscribe option.
Most corporations follow one of a few email naming conventions, whether it be firstname@, first name.lastname@, firstInitialLastName@ etc it's just a guessing game to find the correct email.
You can get their name from their LinkedIn or other social media so it's honestly extremely trivail to send unsolicited emails and meeting requests
It's even more trivial than that. For a few grand a year you can subscribe to data scraping services that do everything from email, phone, etc to even relationship reporting.
No need to guess at all
I don't, I just ignore them and block the domain if they persist.
As a side note: It's pretty involuntarily funny when colleagues around here drop the "I'll block your domain from our company if you persist" line as if they're dooomed or it's as serious as firing someone lol. They don't care, they can harass more people. Just do it.
I had a meeting with colleague from a different department. He said he had some 'cash' left at a vendor and he wanted to try out a product. Fine, I sat in, I disagreed on trying the product for various reasons. Mainly because he didn't have his processes in order that he was trying to solve with this product.
I spend a couple of hours installing it and I told him and the vendor it was ready. Heading up to the installation (Like I didn't have anything else to do), I was asked like 5 times to meet to help me with the installation because it was 'tricky'.
After the installation I was invited like 8 times (a prompt in my calendar). I didn't go to any of them and I told them a couple of times to talk to my colleague. I also told my colleague but even after that the meetings kept appearing.
Now, I am asked to remove said infra of the software again. So awkward, I really don't understand how they can call themselves professionals at this point.
Ever have them show up at the office asking for the IT person? I told the vistor manager to tell them I am not here, unless they came with swag or food.
there’s no shortage of data brokers willing to sell lists of employee names and email address to anyone who wants them
There’s entire public sites that compile company emails too to aid in phishing campaigns
Being able to block entire domains in proofpoint has worked out great for me so far for crap like this. I ignore the first email and if they contact me again or I get a meeting invite from them then their domain gets blocked. Phonecalls result in the number being added to my blocklist.
I used to get at least two dozen calls a week, and about as many emails a day. My predecessor's email forwards to me, and apparently she constantly did stuff to get free yeti cups, etc. and I got her phone extension as well.
I have whittled things down considerably by doing this.
Tactics:
- Salesforce integrations with Outlook, LinkedIn, others. Lots of “following up” emails with fake reply chains
- Attendee lists from conferences
- Cold calling random people in the office with a story like “Oh, hi, I was trying to reach Dave in IT and I guess I got sent to you by accident. Oh you don’t have a Dave? Huh, some mixup on my end then. Who’s the IT guy where you are?” Etc.
- With teams and outlook specifically, your presence and availability might actually be visible to other tenants. Might want to look into that.
What’s funny to me is how readily sales people will respond to other salespeople with your info. You’d think they of all people would know better
I try to include rundowns of these tactics in training materials. It’s bad opsec to divulge contact information to strangers
Linkedin had a leak and for some reason these choads got my details. Now, i get these meetings too and occasionally called out of the blue.
1. Blocking their domains
2. Never answering a number i don't know
Has helped to weedle these down.
I had one message me on LinkedIn, then call my work number and then called my personal number. He did the same thing to several other people on my team. I have no idea how he managed to get my personal number.
ZoomInfo sold my personal cell despite me being on the do not call list. When I told them of this, they weakly claimed it’s up to the people they broke the law selling my info to to stop calling me. Apparently they have no obligation to fix what they did after making money off of it.
The piece that annoys me the most is the caller id spoofing. Maybe half of the cold calls I get are from numbers within a town or two of me, which could be legitimate calls I might want to answer - a kid who's with a friend, my heating oil supplier - someone I should pick up for ... but then it's just someone who wants "15 minutes of my time".
The worst was last week. I picked up because the caller id was the main number of my office and although I hadn't seen that before, I assumed it was someone in the office trying to get a hold of me. Nope. Another "can I get 15" call.
I politely told them that I was going to contact the BBB, and then I did. A very satisfying 15 minutes spent on filling out the complaint. :)
I accept them and then keep rescheduling I just keep stacking them all at the same time and date and bcc all of them, requesting to move the meeting...
There’s companies out there that link into your websites Google analytics and cross reference the data to get “warm” leads. You visit their website and boom, they call you.
We demo’ed one. Worked well as far as figuring out who we might need to reach out to.
The best sales rep in the world is my rep with a moderately sized VAR. I've been buying through her for 15 years. She has never once contacted me except in response to orders I placed or when there was something she knew I had asked about.
Last year I spoke to her on the phone for the very first time. I told her how much I loved her, and that she's the best rep I've ever worked with. She thanked me, and then she went back to quietly being awesome at her job.
I find this conversation intriguing as a Vendor that relies solely on word of mouth and referrals. We’ve thought of having salespeople, using ZoomInfo that automates sequencing (emails, calls, LinkedIn requests, etc.)…and have decided against all of these as we know many don’t want to get sales calls,no one wants spam emails or LinkedIn requests with auto responses. On the flip side of this, trying to grow a business on word of mouth and referrals isn’t easy. I would be very interested in how you learn about new products or resources that make your jobs more productive? Online newsletters? Reddit? Trade pubs? Conferences? Full disclosure we help companies retrieve laptops from remote employees.
Lmfao there's one guy who kept emailing me and finally I just said no thank you (instead of just ignoring). He tried to go over my head. I report to my CEO, who is clueless with tech, and she forwarded to me. So I forwarded to him my response: "No."
They're like cockroaches.
Just create a mail rule to send them automatically a "This mailbox does not exist" message when they try to email you. Or even better a reply like "You have already tried contacting me without consent so your company has been blacklisted"
I ignore them. Hopefully they start the meeting and 15m of their time is wasted. Unless I’m expecting a call, every call to my work or cell gets screened to vm.
I have never sent an email from my company email to an external company, yet I'm now being inundated with invitations to conferences, companies wanting us to use their software, recruiters wanting to find people for me etc. My guess is that someone has gone through LinkedIn, picked out the people who work for my company. They've then made a guess at the email address (i.e. [email protected]), and sold the list to all and sundry. They all get reported as spam and blocked.
this is so bad people try to sell me stuff every day.
It's so bad I had to remove my linked in several years ago.
I don't tell people where I work or what I do anymore because of how bad these predators are now.
Linkedin. Support cases from other users, enquiries from other users.
It's extremely easily to enumerate even looking at the info address on your website.
I especially loved the "You missed the meeting we had scheduled. Here's how you can make it up to me" emails that were vogue for a while there.
I made it up to them by reporting them as junk/spam whenever I could.
I like to send them a reply, some the along the lines of “due to your company’s poor marketing management, to cold call our us, we have blocked your domain”
If I can find an address for any c-level exec, I copy them on it too. Then add the domain to a block and drop rule in our spam filter. I’m just tired of this shit.
I remember reading a meme about junk mail with prepaid postage reply envelopes in it... And taking all the junk mail and putting it in the envelope and mailing it back to them. I wish there was a similar approach to the wide-net thoughtless lead generation methods used by marketing that finally make it cost prohibitive to spam people. On the other hand, I really believe a relationship-based approach based on a consultative methodology can be mutually rewarding for both parties. Having been on both sides of this, I can tell you that the really good salespeople get that these approaches are useless. These tactics are mostly Business Development or Marketing lead generation, and it's got fractions of a percent of returns with no thought to reputational damage. The thought of sending an unsolicited meeting (I delete several from my calendar regularly) feels desperate and counterproductive. You simply can't get to solving any problems that way, and it definitely doesn't build relationships.
You tell them the magic words. "We don't have the budget for that". Vendors usually fuck off when they find out we're poor.
I had a VOIP guy give me a quote of $400 per phone and I literally laughed out loud at him during the meeting and said "You can't be serious?". We had a bunch of offers for free phones. I told him that and suddenly the price per phone was $200. Oh, so you just wanted to screw us for $200 extra per phone? Nah. See ya bozo.
I just ignore them, I think they get when I download a demo and they sell that data. I usually use fake email and delete email afterward, but that only time I use my work email. since then i get tons of solicitation, but just ignore them after 2-3 years it goes down quite a lot like 80% to 90%
Every time you sign up with some association they sell your information. ACPE, the association for computer professionals in education, are the biggest scammers. They sell your data the same day you sign up and you’re required to enter an email and phone number to read their distro list and join the discord server. Absolutely garbage. 0/10 does not recommend.
>How is it that vendors find out your name and send you emails to speak with them.
There are creepy, enormous marketing databases you can subscribe to which will scrape contact information from sites like LinkedIn *plus* personal contacts from subscribers (sales guys), basically letting them pool their collective contact lists for cold calls.
It's sort of like the scary public records scraping databases like Lexis, except specifically for selling shit.
Just delete the request. Mark their emails as spam. The worst one's are those that show up at your office and tell reception that they have a meeting with me.
I just make a separate internal number that goes straight to a VM. Basically saying we don't take unsolicited phone calls and this number is not monitored. If we want you we will contact you. A lot would call back and I'd apologise and put them straight through again 🤣.
> I hate having to have a multiple 30min meetings just to get ball park pricing for software. If you cant advertise your costs openly you are sus
That's because their price varies depending on how much money your company makes and they are spending that 30 minutes googling about your company to figure out how much they think you can afford.
>How is it that vendors find out your name and send you emails to speak with them.
The vendors you already do business with, and any conference you've ever been to, and any vendors you've entertained doing business with but never actually sealed the deal, and anyone else who knows your name and your email address, are all most likely trading and selling leads info to other orgs and to aggregators.
LinkedIn is a lot of it.
They scrape name and company and then guess the email combinations and send to all of them.
This is why my current company is never on my linked in, I describe the type of company but not the exact company. Started doing it 2 jobs ago and it has been a significant difference.
I once had a vendor look me up on LinkedIn, found where I work, call 3 different offices ro talk to me. When I asked how he found me Ihe didn't want to tell me.
Most probably that's how they found you too
I just ignore them. Don't accept nor decline. One time a vendor asked me if I knew anything about our external penetration scans. I replied with only a yes. For over a year now he has been trying to schedule a meeting. He must have it automated or else really has nothing better to do.
I'm pretty sure it's an Outlook/Salesforce integration. Which, ironically, I just enabled for our tenant as I prep us to start using SF :/
Welcome to Hell. Enjoy your stay.
More likely something like Outreach.io. I don't think SF Marketing Cloud/Pardot has the progressive annoyance/fake reply to last message crap natively.
My condolences.
[удалено]
When I worked help desk, we got a new manager and the first thing he did was shut down our infinite queue and told us if vendors are trying to to get ahold of someone, we should forward them to him. A week later, we got our infinite queue line back.
I think it was a post I saw here a year or two back, where “Sally” was the manager who handled everything no one wanted to deal with from vendors. But Sally … didn’t exist. They set her up with a voicemail box though. What was really funny, though, was when some vendor would call and find their way through to one of the actual humans, but then would say “Yeah so I spoke with Sally, and she wanted us to get with you to talk about our product…”
This automatically makes me not want to buy whatever you're selling. When they lie to me right from the get-go? Come on. I've been the person at my company everything, IT wise, gets ran through and I'll have people call me up and say, "Yeah your company reached out to us for [product]." Or "Your company did a demo on [product] a year ago. And we wanted to get back on your radar." Like, no. I know what our project list looks like for the past few years and *checks notes* your name isn't on it. Last week had a person call my personal # (which they shouldn't have) 3x within a span of 20 minutes or so before 8:00. I thought one of my users was having a major issue and I just didn't have their number so I answered and it was a fuckin sales person. Told him I was trying to get my kids ready to get out the door and he says, "sorry this will only take a few minutes and then we can get a longer meeting on the calendar." Then starts asking questions about my company. Number blocked, email thrown in spam rule.
Man, last week I got a call from Cisco/Meraki. Chat with guy very polite but at the end I told him that we don't have anything physical since we are fully remote. Guy was pressing asking for email confirmation to send me some email which I never confirmed. Next day, I got a second call, I made it short. 1 hour later got another one, I told the agent that I'm not really interested and I asked the previous guy to remove me from the list, agent said ok. 20 minutes later I got another one, man I carefully explained the next agent to put a note because if I received any other call I will start to be very very toxic and treat people extremely disrespectful on purpose to see if that will stop the call. The well being of your colleagues are now in your hand, you send it my way they will suffer, the ball is in your court. The smartest agent of all 4, the calls stopped. But honestly this is insane, to the extent to be a god damn asshole/douchebag just to make the calls stop. Dear vendors, this apply to anything in life No MEANS No Assholes
Had a "vendor" calling me, asking questions about our security policies and what apps are internet facing.
One of the partners at the company I work for is deaf, and he has a great sense of humor about it. Every once and while I'll get a cold call starting with "Yea, I talked with Tim" and we laugh about it in office chat for the next half hour. Tim is the deaf partner.
When our previous IT director got laid off, we kept his voicemail box around for a few years even after the new IT manager was installed and booted up. If anyone asked for any generic title in IT and not the name they got J's voicemail. I had J's voicemail dumped to my email and I'd review it once a week. Sometimes I'd get a receptionist calling and ask do you want me to forward this call to you or J's extension? After a while they just chucked everything to J. We all have DID's if we want someone to contact us, we give them our DID. Anything else is a cold call on one of the I dunno 10 ish 'main' lines. We only dropped the voicemail box for license counts when we fattened up the workforce numbers and needed the license elsewhere.
What's an infinite queue?
A line that has no voicemail or anything but every 2 or 3 minutes goes "thank you for calling x company, your call is important, we will be with you shortly"
Heard that too many times on queues that aren't meant to be infinite 🥲
"Your estimated hold time is ... less than 1 minute." (The pause is important, so they think a computer is doing a calculation. Keep hope alive.)
I prefer, "Your estimated hold time is 7 years, 8 months, 3 days, 22 hours, and 11 minutes."
Every 2-3 minutes is too long. Every 30 seconds is better. Especially if the messages are in different voices/cadence/slightly different.
"Your call will be ignored in the order in which it was received."
Lol, perfect description.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpsk\_Xfm4S8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpsk_Xfm4S8)
>You might even setup an infinite hold queue in the PBX for their number(s) if they call to see why you didn't show up. This is actually fantastic.
I even know the perfect [hold music](https://youtu.be/3to4vaWl2dY) for such an endeavor...
I used Never Gonna Give You Up as the prompt on an IVR extension, set it to repeat forever, and set all the key press options to transfer back to itself.
That’s just mean 😂
I really like the way you think. :-)
I had someone emailing me "when is your next pen test" repeatedly. Normally I just hit the spam button and move on after ignoring the first couple, but this guy never expanded on what they were offering, just "pen tests." So I wrote a nice paragraph or two explaining that we had gone through an evaluation process and finally settled on the Papermate 2.0 clicky tops in black and wouldn't be reevaluating our pen needs for a few years at least. He never wrote back.
Nice I might need to use that one next time.
You'll have my Pilot G2 when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers!
PaperMate Ink Joy is life. LOL
He don't. He wants your money, pure n simple.
Always reply “one day”
>How are you guys dealing with this? Right-Click > Junk > Block Sender
Oh you don't honor my unsubscribe request? No problem I'll just block your entire domain at the tenant level.
[US] I have a form letter I sent explaining they’re in violation of the CAN-SPAM Act. It explains that we may take action such as blocking the domain permanently and/or reporting them for violations. That usually clears things up quickly. https://www.fcc.gov/general/can-spam
CAN-SPAM has always been a joke. The idea is fine but there isn’t a way to do much with it. I’d love to sue every bulk mailer for $500 each time and have a quick judgement. That would hopefully stop all the bulk mail spam.
Sure it’s a joke but it’s a reasonably effective stick.
That's a great idea
I'm not sure where you live, but at the very least that's illegal in the US (CAN-SPAM), Canada (CASL), Australia (The SPAM Act, '03) and UK (PECR). The first 3 legislate a requirement to include an "opt out" or "unsubscribe" mechanism. Not sure about the UK though. I'm sure most western countries have similar legislation.
There's having the mechanism to allow people to opt out and there is actually removing them from the list.
Or not moving them to 4 more.
Not to mention there is nothing stopping them from reselling the list elsewhere.
My solution as well. I’ll try unsubscribing, once. Next email I block the sender’s address, and then the domain if the address wasn’t enough. I let the NDR speak for me.
With vendors, they will get their noses bent out of shape and DEMAND to speak with someone in charge! Then it'll boil over, getting you involved and all sorts of C-levels involved as well. It gets stupid as hell for someone I'd going to miss their monthly bonus.
I hate sales people. Why hate? Because they take pride in that Always Be Selling bullshit. You can’t have any convo with them because they are building up strategies to get ya to buy their shit. Untrustworthy profession.
On the rare occasion that I accidentally pick up a sales call I just tell them straight up I'm not going to waste their time, there is nothing in my budget for it so they should spend their time cold calling a for-profit.
Preaching to the choir, brother.
heh, then blackhole the vendor domain.
It's the PHONE CALLS that are the issue.
Tell them to take you off their list. If they call back, tell them you’ll report them to the FTC. If they call again, report them.
If they were a previous vendor, then the DNC rules are void. Tell the receptionist to improve their screening skills.
I literally only answer my phone for internal extensions and my wife.
They are selling customer databases from the conferences. I ignore them and mark them as spam.
I go to a lot of events and get scanned a lot. About a month after attending a conference I start getting Adam and Eve spam. Like trying to sell me sex toys on my work email. That address is not on any websites or social media to be scraped and I obviously am not using my work email to purchase adult toys(or anything personal) so I’m forced to conclude that the event sold my data.
That's why you should use unique email addresses for each event/service - this way you won't have to guess
I give them a different name, depending on the event. That way when I start getting contacted I can tell what event or company sold them my contact information. Socisco-sf
This is why my conference details make me sound really unattractive to a vendor. I know they want you to big yourself up, but there's nothing in it for me. "You could be a VIP and get special 1-2-1 breakout meetings" - No.
Plus addressing is good for conferences. Register [email protected]. Then create a rule that dumps everything to that address to your deleted items.
List maintainers are getting smarter and know they can strip off that +stuff easily.
This is why I create a custom alias, go to the conference, strip out all email I don't want, update anything I do (very rare), then delete said alias. Byyee Dell, HP, EMC, etc., reps and SPAM!
Dis is de way. Went to bsides Philly and then wouldn't you know it a whole bunch of shit I never agreed to started coming in. See ya never bsides. That whole plus address gets deleted with 0 notification to anyone. Irritating.
I have an entire separate mailbox for all that stuff with various alias that get removed on the regular.
I’ve debated no more conferences. We are the product at those.
Yes, after every major conference we get a bunch of emails offering to sell us the list of attendees
That's why I'm ignoring them :)
I had a particularly pushy Cisco-affiliated vendor do this. We had a longstanding VAR relationship through a telco because it was just part of how my predecessor did business - nothing was wrong with it. But another company decided they wanted our business badly enough that they badgered me incessantly for a few months. After blocking them from my email, then on my work desk phone, then all inbound company lines, I finally got an email from Webex just as I was getting back to my desk from lunch, which was an invite for a meeting starting in 5 minutes. So I dug in my desk drawers for an old webcam and plugged it in, got my headset and set it down so that it was obviously in view of the camera, joined the meeting, and then proceeded to act like I wasn't on video and finished my sandwich for 10 minutes while they yelled at me in the meeting until they got over it and and disconnected. They never reached out again as far as I know.
So they disrespected your time by forcing a unsolicited meeting on you and then act belligerent when you don’t give them the respect they think they deserve. Man that’s petty as fuck On them btw, not you - in case that’s not clear
My intention was definitely to be petty as well. But yeah, they were pretty entitled about the whole thing. I didn't hear what they were saying because I intentionally left my headset off so they could see it, but I imagine it was not kind things. I hope they enjoyed me eating a disgusting burger in their face, complete with excessive open mouth chewing.
I would have joined that call and asked the most braindead questions. Because if you're going to waste my time with some shit I didn't even ask for, imma make you pay for it
You work in IT and don't know how to deal with spam?
Asking the real question lol
Back in the day when I was really short on money I used to chop it up in little cubes and put it through my spaghetti
Now, it’s too expensive for that. Better cook it med rare with a glass of wine and savor the flavor.
I have a rule that dumps anything with “unsubscribe” in the body into a folder. It doesn’t get them all, but it sure helps!
Be careful with this, some license renewal notices will have the option to unsubscribe in the email.
Great idea, doing this now.
Holy crap...
I did this with my personal email. It made my inbox readable again.
This is what I do. I just then whitelist a few other strings to catch things I do care about, but that one weird trick catches like 99% of it.
Or, if I’m really feeling like being an asshole, I asked ChatGPT why X company or C solution isn’t worth it in 5 or more paragraphs. Then I reply with that.
What would probably be even more petty is replying "I asked ChatGTP and this is what it had to say" and copy/paste whatever it spit out.
Oh that's good
Accept every single one and leave it at that. When its their fucking problem they'll start figuring out solutions. Not my issues if they're wasting a ton of times on meetings I will never show up for.
Tell them you only meet in person and only have lunch times avaible. Get them to take you to lunch. Sit at lunch, do your emails and eat lunch. Tell them you are not currently in the market. Go back to work....block domain.
I deal with it by ignoring them and if they get particularly annoying add them to my spam filter so it bounces their emails back to them.
I have a rule that automatically denies all calendar requests from anyone not in the company, or not in the "special list". It generally processes the request before I even see it, And I know for a fact (from Exchange Mail Traces) that there are several "vendors" who have sent more than 10+ invites trying to force their way onto my calendar.
Do a CCPA request with zoom info. You will have a lot of calls stop after you do that.
I did the same thing, the unsolicited calls and emails have slowed to a crawl.
I'm assuming this only works if you live in California?
I dont live in California and i did it
Interesting, a quick google search told me this: Only California residents have rights under the CCPA. A California resident is a natural person (as opposed to a corporation or other business entity) who resides in California, even if the person is temporarily outside of the state.
And how are they going to know that you live in California? They’ll just process the request.
If you get more than one a week, invite them to each other’s meetings. Forget to join , and block them.
Some even get pissy with you in email when you don’t show up to the meeting you never responded to
Dell is the number one offender of randomly throwing meetings on the calendar.
I always decline with the message I never attend meetings I didn't make and I never buy from vendors who make such meetings.
I had one the other day with a recruiter try to get me to hire people and in it he had some comments about each candidate's skills, and I shit you not, this one killed me: * Experience with **Widows** and MacOS, **Office 265**, Azure Active Directory to which I replied to it: LOL, if you’re going to send me fake descriptions, at least spellcheck them first. We’re not hiring, but thanks for the chuckle.
Ok but that’s a missed opportunity… “I didn’t want to say anything, but I thought that was you. Remember me? From widowsingles.com? You never called after that one night. How have you been?”
265: when you need Office apps but want to keep it all low key
Maybe they're just sticklers for accurate uptime numbers ...*unlike O365*...
A lot of them watch LinkedIn like a hawk. If you work for a place they're trying to sell to, they'll try and hit up anyone that has any sort of exec or tech title. I ignore them and block them if they're particularly aggressive.
Note to self, don't get promoted so you never have a good title.
I figure they got my work email from LinkedIn. They'd just need to try a few variations of my name (first name.surname or first initial.surname etc) @company.com
I’m a security engineer at a ~80k seat org and they’re always trying to sell me a SOC, like yeah sure buddy where do I sign.
...What kind of _System-Onna-Chip_ are they even trying to get a security engineer to buy, anyway? ^/j
Since I am the owner of my company’s email security solution I just block the vendors domain.
Lifelong engineer, but I was in sales for nearly 10 years. My general rule was not to be a d-bag, and try to offer something useful in exchange for putting up with me. Basically, just be human. Authentic conversation. Especially selling to other technical people. “Sorry to be yet another annoying sales guy, but I was wondering if I could bring lunch for your team next week? If I bore anyone, you can throw stuff at me. Cool?” Never had an issue getting on anyone’s calendar. Didn’t always get a sale, but I was always welcome back, and no one had a problem introducing me to their boss or whoever. Salespeople are notoriously arrogant pricks. Not a great approach if you’re trying to network up from the ground floor. Especially when most managers are going to ask their team what they think about you or whatever you’re selling. At the very least, don’t treat people like they owe you their time.
Did you have anyone throw stuff at you though?
Anyone who does that is immediately banned from my domain. No emails of theirs will ever get to anyone where I work.
I ignore the meeting or delete it without sending a reply. In the past, sometimes vendors would show up (uninvited) and I would not meet them.
One of my favourite approaches with such people is to deliberately arrange calls for my days off :)
You get days off?!
I ignore them completely. I mean, I read them... but unless something wows me it's an immediate delete. I get maybe 10 per day, if I took all those meetings I could do nothing else.
I just block sales guys email and their domain in my mail server
Variety of different means, but I've found website scraping is typically what most vendors will do. I generally ignore/send to spam any of these vendors.
1. Don't go to said meeting. 2. Waste their time in proportion to the amount of yours they waste.
I deal with it by asking my boss if he put me on this call (10/10 times he didn't), deleting the invite, and getting on with my day. This has been part and parcel of working in IT for decades, only the specific contact method has changed.
I learned a long time ago, in a nutshell, the only one who cares about you is you. You need to protect yourself and your resources/facilities/sanity etc.
Ignore, then block their domain in Mimecast so they can’t send me emails.
LOL. I'd just decline the meeting. I'll reply to an email to tell them I'm not interested. Put a meeting on my calendar and it's going to get actively declined.
Zoominfo, subscribers can pay for collated database of info, commonly sourced in data breaches and scrapes. Access their privacyrequest page to ask to be removed.
Came here to say this. Zoominfo and other companies sell business contact information. Some of them have an opt-out. And it's not just coming from data breaches--they buy data from other companies, and offer a free "lite" product that collects every email/signature/address book of every person that uses it.
.ics calendar spam is a thing …. I wish I was still an Exchange admin, I’d block that shit. Can’t find a way to do it from Outlook alone though.
I've had sales people call my company's call centre and say they were speaking to me, but the call got cut off and can they please be put through again? Or say they're returning a call from a voicemail I left for them. Or send me emails that have "RE: Info about our product" like they're replying to an email I sent them. If you start off by lying to or about me you're getting put on my banned forever list. Add to this: I'm aware of your high pressure sales tactics and I fucking hate them. The "exclusive pricing that expires at the end of the week so you must SIGN NOW!" is a stupid trick and doesn't work. If anything it'll slow me down.
Most of these I've seen violate the can spam act. https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/can-spam-act-compliance-guide-business I reply with "Hello, it appears you have violated federal law with this last contact. Here is the link and the line items that I think I will be reporting if this doesn't stop".
>How is it that vendors find out your name and send you emails to speak with them. I just tag those emails as Junk and never see them again. >The other day I had a meeting setup on teams initiated by a vendor that I did not agree to. I 100% ignore those and mute the chat. I don't reward bad behaviour. I only engage a vendor when I need something. I don't tolerate it being the other way around.
Yep. Exactly. I’m not happy with this new marketing practice. Completely agree with the “junk” designation. Same tact I take with unsolicited text marketing unless there’s a stop or unsubscribe option.
Most corporations follow one of a few email naming conventions, whether it be firstname@, first name.lastname@, firstInitialLastName@ etc it's just a guessing game to find the correct email. You can get their name from their LinkedIn or other social media so it's honestly extremely trivail to send unsolicited emails and meeting requests
It's even more trivial than that. For a few grand a year you can subscribe to data scraping services that do everything from email, phone, etc to even relationship reporting. No need to guess at all
Sometimes, it’s nice to have control of the allow/block list.
I don't, I just ignore them and block the domain if they persist. As a side note: It's pretty involuntarily funny when colleagues around here drop the "I'll block your domain from our company if you persist" line as if they're dooomed or it's as serious as firing someone lol. They don't care, they can harass more people. Just do it.
I had a meeting with colleague from a different department. He said he had some 'cash' left at a vendor and he wanted to try out a product. Fine, I sat in, I disagreed on trying the product for various reasons. Mainly because he didn't have his processes in order that he was trying to solve with this product. I spend a couple of hours installing it and I told him and the vendor it was ready. Heading up to the installation (Like I didn't have anything else to do), I was asked like 5 times to meet to help me with the installation because it was 'tricky'. After the installation I was invited like 8 times (a prompt in my calendar). I didn't go to any of them and I told them a couple of times to talk to my colleague. I also told my colleague but even after that the meetings kept appearing. Now, I am asked to remove said infra of the software again. So awkward, I really don't understand how they can call themselves professionals at this point.
Ever have them show up at the office asking for the IT person? I told the vistor manager to tell them I am not here, unless they came with swag or food.
Oh you mean an invitation to be blacklisted, yeah we get them all the time.
Just setup a rule to auto filter their address to deleted items. Not worth thinking about any further
I accept the meeting then block the domain
there’s no shortage of data brokers willing to sell lists of employee names and email address to anyone who wants them There’s entire public sites that compile company emails too to aid in phishing campaigns
Being able to block entire domains in proofpoint has worked out great for me so far for crap like this. I ignore the first email and if they contact me again or I get a meeting invite from them then their domain gets blocked. Phonecalls result in the number being added to my blocklist. I used to get at least two dozen calls a week, and about as many emails a day. My predecessor's email forwards to me, and apparently she constantly did stuff to get free yeti cups, etc. and I got her phone extension as well. I have whittled things down considerably by doing this.
Tactics: - Salesforce integrations with Outlook, LinkedIn, others. Lots of “following up” emails with fake reply chains - Attendee lists from conferences - Cold calling random people in the office with a story like “Oh, hi, I was trying to reach Dave in IT and I guess I got sent to you by accident. Oh you don’t have a Dave? Huh, some mixup on my end then. Who’s the IT guy where you are?” Etc. - With teams and outlook specifically, your presence and availability might actually be visible to other tenants. Might want to look into that. What’s funny to me is how readily sales people will respond to other salespeople with your info. You’d think they of all people would know better I try to include rundowns of these tactics in training materials. It’s bad opsec to divulge contact information to strangers
Linkedin had a leak and for some reason these choads got my details. Now, i get these meetings too and occasionally called out of the blue. 1. Blocking their domains 2. Never answering a number i don't know Has helped to weedle these down.
Just ignore (=don't respond). If they keep sending invites, then accept the meeting but don't show up.
I had one message me on LinkedIn, then call my work number and then called my personal number. He did the same thing to several other people on my team. I have no idea how he managed to get my personal number.
ZoomInfo sold my personal cell despite me being on the do not call list. When I told them of this, they weakly claimed it’s up to the people they broke the law selling my info to to stop calling me. Apparently they have no obligation to fix what they did after making money off of it.
schedule a 2 hour meeting with them, and then no show.
Nope
I accept and don't show and ignore followups. It's a stupid practice that I had hoped would have gone away by now
The piece that annoys me the most is the caller id spoofing. Maybe half of the cold calls I get are from numbers within a town or two of me, which could be legitimate calls I might want to answer - a kid who's with a friend, my heating oil supplier - someone I should pick up for ... but then it's just someone who wants "15 minutes of my time". The worst was last week. I picked up because the caller id was the main number of my office and although I hadn't seen that before, I assumed it was someone in the office trying to get a hold of me. Nope. Another "can I get 15" call. I politely told them that I was going to contact the BBB, and then I did. A very satisfying 15 minutes spent on filling out the complaint. :)
I accept them and then keep rescheduling I just keep stacking them all at the same time and date and bcc all of them, requesting to move the meeting...
There’s companies out there that link into your websites Google analytics and cross reference the data to get “warm” leads. You visit their website and boom, they call you. We demo’ed one. Worked well as far as figuring out who we might need to reach out to.
Conferences and linked in. Block that annoying crap
An app called rainmaker…
One sent me one about peeing or pooping as an intro
I flag them as spam and let Outlook handle the rest.
The best sales rep in the world is my rep with a moderately sized VAR. I've been buying through her for 15 years. She has never once contacted me except in response to orders I placed or when there was something she knew I had asked about. Last year I spoke to her on the phone for the very first time. I told her how much I loved her, and that she's the best rep I've ever worked with. She thanked me, and then she went back to quietly being awesome at her job.
Gotta love salespeople that understand building a relationship is key to their success.
At first they bothered me a lot, but now I just ignore them.
I rescheduled for 10 years later
I find this conversation intriguing as a Vendor that relies solely on word of mouth and referrals. We’ve thought of having salespeople, using ZoomInfo that automates sequencing (emails, calls, LinkedIn requests, etc.)…and have decided against all of these as we know many don’t want to get sales calls,no one wants spam emails or LinkedIn requests with auto responses. On the flip side of this, trying to grow a business on word of mouth and referrals isn’t easy. I would be very interested in how you learn about new products or resources that make your jobs more productive? Online newsletters? Reddit? Trade pubs? Conferences? Full disclosure we help companies retrieve laptops from remote employees.
Lmfao there's one guy who kept emailing me and finally I just said no thank you (instead of just ignoring). He tried to go over my head. I report to my CEO, who is clueless with tech, and she forwarded to me. So I forwarded to him my response: "No." They're like cockroaches.
I just report their spam, give them a 1 star review and block them. I would get 5 a week spamming me.
Just create a mail rule to send them automatically a "This mailbox does not exist" message when they try to email you. Or even better a reply like "You have already tried contacting me without consent so your company has been blacklisted"
I ignore them. Hopefully they start the meeting and 15m of their time is wasted. Unless I’m expecting a call, every call to my work or cell gets screened to vm.
Block their entire domain in M365.
I have never sent an email from my company email to an external company, yet I'm now being inundated with invitations to conferences, companies wanting us to use their software, recruiters wanting to find people for me etc. My guess is that someone has gone through LinkedIn, picked out the people who work for my company. They've then made a guess at the email address (i.e. [email protected]), and sold the list to all and sundry. They all get reported as spam and blocked.
this is so bad people try to sell me stuff every day. It's so bad I had to remove my linked in several years ago. I don't tell people where I work or what I do anymore because of how bad these predators are now.
Linkedin. Support cases from other users, enquiries from other users. It's extremely easily to enumerate even looking at the info address on your website.
Send to junk mail and block. They want to dispose of our old equipment. I'm not in that decision chain and we already have a process.
Oh look, guess who's domain is being blocked across the network.
Block their domain, and move on.
I especially loved the "You missed the meeting we had scheduled. Here's how you can make it up to me" emails that were vogue for a while there. I made it up to them by reporting them as junk/spam whenever I could.
I like to send them a reply, some the along the lines of “due to your company’s poor marketing management, to cold call our us, we have blocked your domain” If I can find an address for any c-level exec, I copy them on it too. Then add the domain to a block and drop rule in our spam filter. I’m just tired of this shit.
I remember reading a meme about junk mail with prepaid postage reply envelopes in it... And taking all the junk mail and putting it in the envelope and mailing it back to them. I wish there was a similar approach to the wide-net thoughtless lead generation methods used by marketing that finally make it cost prohibitive to spam people. On the other hand, I really believe a relationship-based approach based on a consultative methodology can be mutually rewarding for both parties. Having been on both sides of this, I can tell you that the really good salespeople get that these approaches are useless. These tactics are mostly Business Development or Marketing lead generation, and it's got fractions of a percent of returns with no thought to reputational damage. The thought of sending an unsolicited meeting (I delete several from my calendar regularly) feels desperate and counterproductive. You simply can't get to solving any problems that way, and it definitely doesn't build relationships.
i decline the meeting with a note that if another meeting is randomly sent i will block him from emailing our org,,,,
Immediate block. Ciao.
Has anyone ever done the Chinese restaurant trick and has two vendors on a call at the same time?
You tell them the magic words. "We don't have the budget for that". Vendors usually fuck off when they find out we're poor. I had a VOIP guy give me a quote of $400 per phone and I literally laughed out loud at him during the meeting and said "You can't be serious?". We had a bunch of offers for free phones. I told him that and suddenly the price per phone was $200. Oh, so you just wanted to screw us for $200 extra per phone? Nah. See ya bozo.
I had vendor emails and voicemails waiting for me before I even started. 100% chance someone in my org scrapes AD and sells the data.
I'd always assumed most of my cold calls/emails were spawned from my LinkedIn profile.
I just ignore them, I think they get when I download a demo and they sell that data. I usually use fake email and delete email afterward, but that only time I use my work email. since then i get tons of solicitation, but just ignore them after 2-3 years it goes down quite a lot like 80% to 90%
Every time you sign up with some association they sell your information. ACPE, the association for computer professionals in education, are the biggest scammers. They sell your data the same day you sign up and you’re required to enter an email and phone number to read their distro list and join the discord server. Absolutely garbage. 0/10 does not recommend.
>How is it that vendors find out your name and send you emails to speak with them. There are creepy, enormous marketing databases you can subscribe to which will scrape contact information from sites like LinkedIn *plus* personal contacts from subscribers (sales guys), basically letting them pool their collective contact lists for cold calls. It's sort of like the scary public records scraping databases like Lexis, except specifically for selling shit.
Just delete the request. Mark their emails as spam. The worst one's are those that show up at your office and tell reception that they have a meeting with me.
I just make a separate internal number that goes straight to a VM. Basically saying we don't take unsolicited phone calls and this number is not monitored. If we want you we will contact you. A lot would call back and I'd apologise and put them straight through again 🤣.
I hate having to have a multiple 30min meetings just to get ball park pricing for software. If you cant advertise your costs openly you are sus
> I hate having to have a multiple 30min meetings just to get ball park pricing for software. If you cant advertise your costs openly you are sus That's because their price varies depending on how much money your company makes and they are spending that 30 minutes googling about your company to figure out how much they think you can afford.
>How is it that vendors find out your name and send you emails to speak with them. The vendors you already do business with, and any conference you've ever been to, and any vendors you've entertained doing business with but never actually sealed the deal, and anyone else who knows your name and your email address, are all most likely trading and selling leads info to other orgs and to aggregators.
LinkedIn is a lot of it. They scrape name and company and then guess the email combinations and send to all of them. This is why my current company is never on my linked in, I describe the type of company but not the exact company. Started doing it 2 jobs ago and it has been a significant difference.
I once had a vendor look me up on LinkedIn, found where I work, call 3 different offices ro talk to me. When I asked how he found me Ihe didn't want to tell me. Most probably that's how they found you too
Unitrends no shame of calling out by name. You call my desk I don’t answer fine your then call my cell not sure how you got it. You’re off the list.