I received an e-mail with this is a subject line exactly as typed:
10 email mistakes home services businesses make
I’ve always treated the subject as a title and thought it should look like this “10 Email Mistakes Home Services Businesses Make”. For a company that specialized in e-mails, this struck me as odd.
Not knowing if my thought on the subject line was correct, I decided to reply to her email.
She responded with:
The Fuck is Going On?
#17 said not to use ALL CAPS in an email which was a misinterpretation of what I was referring to. 2 minutes later she called on the phone and started off her intro with “This is Jessica with a capital J.” I didn’t laugh because it wasn’t funny. I could hear chatter on the other end of the line which showed me she was in a call center. After I explained to her that I thought her email was leveling me (they make the title wrong so you’d call and point it out to them which worked remarkably well), it was clear this was not her intention. I gave her the floor asking her what her company did.
Business Man and Red Phone Series
She sounded nervous going through her patter which I was picking up on as she was babbling incessantly about nothing I had an interest in. This is an inexperienced salesperson’s first mistake to not cater to the customer but assuming their cookie cutter sales pitch will appeal to a real person. At some point I stopped her and started telling her about what our company does and she told me that her company doesn’t do what I needed. She proceeded to tell me that we weren’t a good fit. At this point I once again thought I was being leveled because what kind of salesperson says the services their company is offering is useless to a potential client. I was dumbfounded.
It reminded me of this situation.
In no way do I regard myself as an expert salesman but there’s a good chance after doing it for 10 years now that I’ve acquired skills that a 22 year old in a call center hasn’t learned. Being able to align a service to a customer is not as tricky as it sounds but you have to be polished enough to not make the other side not question your expertise. I questioned this process at every single point because I wanted to see if it was done with intentional leveling. This particular case was not but the method is curious. Does anyone else find this interaction interesting?
She’s a genius. She got you to post it on your blog and now many more people will see it. Ill probably buy the product.
But how does a list of the ten things not to do have a #17?
Gourlay, nice to see you come out of the woodwork. The rumor is you’re laying serious pipe around the Richmond area. The plumbing infrastructure is booming.
She referenced an article that was an outside source, not her top 10. It would have been even more brilliant to have a #17 in her list of top 10.
I don’t really find the interaction interesting, but “this is Jessica with a capital J” had me cracking up. What a solid intro to the call
now you’re a capitalization critic? is she hot?
I regret my last line of this post. It should have been, what are your thoughts on capitalizing the subject line?
Learned it from you JKash. Trying to be a better blogger / email writer.