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February 9, 2006

Google Cold Calls Battelle On AdSense; Fails To Do Homework

Vignette: Google's Sales Call and the (New?) Fifty Percent Rule is a nice chuckle from John Battelle, where he gets a cold call from a member of Google's AdSense sales force trying to get him to carry Google ads. He's got a loose transcript that's very amusing. But it's also pretty serious. It makes good sense that your sales team should do some homework about those they are approaching. Clearly, that doesn't seem to be the case.

How difficult is it to Google the person you're about to have a talk with? John thinks that would be wise, I agree. It's basic homework you should do for anyone you'd want to approach. At the very least, you might learn something to help you with the pitch.

Had that been done with John, what would the sales person have learned? Let's scan the Google results for john battelle:

In 0.22 seconds (that's the time Google reported taking to generate these results), you'd see at a glance that this "john battelle" character you're about to pitch AdSense to sounds very similar to some "john battelle" guy that talked with Googlers like yourself. And he was on the official Google Video Blog? Alarm bells should be ringing, by now.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on February 9, 2006 7:43 AM