Intrusive Marketing: How to push your "customers" away

Today I had an experience that left me momentarily speechless and those that know me know how rare that is!

I spend a lot of time online researching products from different vendors as well as keeping abreast of what is happening in the industry. Whether it be sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn discussions- I find myself on a lot of websites, some which require leaving contact information to download whitepapers or participate in webinars.

This however was a unique experience.

Yesterday around 5:30pm, I was finishing off my day and about to log-off when I quickly Googled a company and then went on their website. I spent maybe 3 minutes on their site looking at their products and added it to my list of companies I would explore further. That was the end of that. Or so I thought.

This morning, as I was going through my emails, the phone rang. I looked at it, hesitated but answered anyways (I am always wary of telemarketers) and much to my surprise it was THAT COMPANY. Yes, the company that I googled the night before. “Hello! This is John from Company-X, do you have some time to talk?”
Me (clearly taken aback) “Ah, yes” (trying to remember if I had left any information on the site or was this pure coincidence?). “Great, we see that you have some interest in our products and have spent some time on our site”, continues John. Me, thinking to myself-“You do??”

“So do you have any questions??”, says John.
“Yes! How did you find me?”
“We use something called Lead—— (I will not endorse the company here) and we are able to do ip detection and find out where people are coming from”, says John matter-of-factly.

Let me get this straight-I just happened to google your company, spent 3-5 minutes on your site and you then mapped my ip address to my company website and then called me.

“Yes!”

I couldn’t continue any further. I simply stated that I had no questions as I had not spent enough time exploring the solution (clearly I needed more than the 5 minutes I had spent).

I hung up and for the next 5 minutes just stared at my computer thinking about what just happened. Talk about intrusive! It made me start to think about how many other companies out there are doing the same thing *but* not calling me because I didn’t show enough interest?

How does this relate to social media? This is exactly what you don’t want to do! You need to engage, draw the person in and let them come to you when they are ready. What happened now is that I felt the solution was forced on me and consequently I was no longer interested. Had they given me some more time to examine their solution and then maybe call me, I may have felt different. Now I just felt like I was being “watched” and that they were just waiting to sell me something, anything.

Too intrusive? What do you think?