The last Grinch of 2016!

I don’t know why, but all of a sudden I have been inundated with robocalls on my office phone.  And the absolutely weird thing — no one is there!

If I answer the phone, it clicks and no person answers me back.  Sometimes, I am across the room or want to just finish a sentence I’m writing.  These calls don’t even go for three rings
.  Because I’m very lucky with my phone system, as soon as a call comes in, I get to choose “Answer” or “Send to Voicemail” from my computer.  If I’m on the other line — or quite frankly, if the caller ID says something like “Unknown” — I immediately send the call to my voice mail.  And when I go to listen to the voicemail, this saga gets just a little more strange.  There is no message left!  So my day has been interrupted and I don’t even know by whom!  Two days ago, I had twelve of these calls in a three hour period.  Four of them were from the same number, so were repeat calls.

So guess what?  Yep — you guessed it.  I now block those numbers (again, thanks to that great phone system I have).

The real Grinch about this story, however, is that some business owner is out there thinking their calls are being made and getting through.  And I’ll bet they are paying for these calls.  Think about it — everyone is trying to find the right way to get new clients.  Every business is trying all kinds of calling, mailings, emails, social media, public relations — how do each of us find new business?  And someone is sitting in his/her office, wondering why the message they carefully crafted isn’t really working.  Do they need to do more split testing?  Hire a professional voice-over person?

Nope — they need to figure out why the Grinch who stole a large chunk of their marketing budget has a heart that is many times too small to even leave a message.

We all need to make sure our marketing efforts are working; we need to have a clear message and a target audience.  And we need to carefully monitor our vendors.  And we all need to have a great 2017!