How the three‐foot rule can harm your small business

A few days ago the phone rang in our office and when I answered the caller was a lady who works for a local supplier of printers ink and cartridges and whose job was to make telemarketing calls. I told her right away that we didn’t had a single printer in the office. Yet she tried harder and harder to persuade me every time I explain this to her. I remembered a story of a wheelchair salesman who desperately tried to sell to wheelchairs to bypassers at a pedestrian crossing. I felt sorry for the lady because she probably had a sales target to achieve and sorrier for the owner(s) of the company she works for.

Everyone of you is bombarded by offers of products and services we wouldn’t consume neither in this life nor in our next life. Even if you are in sales and throw a sales pitch there’ll be tones of sales pitches thrown to you. For example, if you announce on your social media account that you wrote a book on famous dishes in Turkey you will probably get private messages with the following offers:

1-hi, we are a professional translation office, would you like to translate your book to other languages?

2- hello, we are a reputed training establishment and we offer advance courses on how to sell your book…

3-congratulations for publishing this great book, we supply the fines spices commonly used in Turkish dishes, I can offer you a huge discount…

Aggressively selling to everyone around also known as the three‐foot rule has widely been overrated. This rule states that anyone who comes within three feet of them is worth talking to about their product, service, or business. If people are interested in your product they wouldn’t wait for you to call them.

That does not mean you should abstain from any promotional or marketing activities. You just need to be professional and apply the right techniques when it comes to telling potential customers about your existence. Do not make a lot of unnecessary noise and do not make people run away whenever they see you from a distance. Just make sure that you are there whenever your future clients are ready to hear your sales pitch.

As a consultant to small businesses I always start by inspecting how my clients carry our their marketing activities. People hate being prospected and targeted with no consideration to whatsoever. Those who could get it will be able to save a lot on marketing expenses and elevate sales beyond their wildest dreams.

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