Is this marketing – "In these challenging times"?

• I met this morning with some salespeople I’d never buy from. I don’t use their stuff, my customers do. And likely very few of them will need their stuff. It was just a rep taking his principle out for ‘sales call theatre’. They came without qualifying me or my need. But in these ‘trying times’, no stone goes unturned.
• Last night at a rock concert with my daughter, the lead singer of 3 Doors Down thanked the audience for coming: “I know in these challenging times concert tickets can be the first thing to go.”
• And my email seems to filling with lots of marketing offers to help ‘in a down market’.

All these get me thinking about the economy and what people are doing to sell stuff:

• Shouldn’t those sales guys qualified me before visiting? Not jumped straight into a PowerPoint?
• Isn’t a concert a place to forget your troubles, not be reminded of them?
• Is talking about a ‘down market’ just negative talk that should be avoided?

Are people’s sensibilities being thrown off by current conditions? Or is this appropriate behavior? What is appropriate?

While negative talk and behavior can put your client on edge, someone needs to acknowledge the elephant in the room. And while empathy can be faked, humility, like that of the singer, is honest.

And humility is where it should be okay. All of a sudden we aren’t running on to the ‘next job’. There is a thankfulness that goes with humility that actually strengthens the business relationship. If not today, but for the past, and for the future.

We had a client call us this week, “I know business may be getting lean, but I wanted to keep you up to date with this project.” Humbly, our salesperson listened.