An Illinois salesman left the snow-filled streets of
Chicago for a vacation in Florida. His wife was on a business trip and
was planning to meet him there the next day.
When he reached his hotel, he decided to send his wife a quick email. Unable to find the scrap of paper on which he had written her email address, he did his best to type it in from memory.
Unfortunately, he missed one letter and his note was directed instead to an elderly preacher's wife, whose husband had passed away only the day before. When the grieving widow checked her email, she took one look at the monitor, let out a piercing scream and fell to the floor in a dead faint. At the sound, her family rushed into the room and saw this note on the screen:
DEAREST WIFE: JUST GOT CHECKED IN. EVERYTHING PREPARED FOR YOUR ARRIVAL TOMORROW.
P. S. SURE IS HOT DOWN HERE.
Moral of the story. True sales professionals
understand that in order to be successful at sales they need to be
accurate with their emails. Failure to ensure that you know, and
correctly identify and personalize your targets, plus, failure provide
them with information of value, could be considered spam. Being
considered a spammer, one who sends out meaningless promotions to folks
they don't know, could have a big negative impact on your ability to
send real emails to real potential prospects in the future. Several
mail servers could 'blacklist' you and that could have a real negative
impact on your future earnings.
"Think about spam filters; if email didn't come from
someone that someone you know knows, that's an important signal, and
one we could embed in the environment; we just don't. I just want the
world to be filtered through my social graph." - Clay Shirky
