We’re not talking about telemarketers in the sense you’re referring to if we’re talking about Sweetwater. Or if you are you’re drawing a false equivalency IMO and it’s hardly germane to what we’re talking about in this thread. Because “cold calling” is precisely not what Sweetwater is doing
However, if your personal experiences with Sweetwater (since I’m assuming you either are or at one time were a customer) are apparently very different from my own or those of the people I know who deal with them, then it seems odd to me. Because I’ve never
once had one of their sales reps try to sell me anything when they called. Unless you consider an innocuous: “Is there anything else you need or we can help you with?” begore signing off to be a hard-sell sales pitch.
As far as unsolicited calls from unknown callers go, I always allowed unidentified calls to go to voicemail first. Caller ID is a wonderful thing. And automatically notifying a caller that your phone will decline any “blocked” or “private” number call is an inexpensive service worth adding on your phone. I never saw the point of responding to some jerk on the phone by acting like a foul mouthed jerk in return. I prefer to save any swearing I do for
very special situations. But maybe that’s just me.
Regarding personal marking and marketing to the affluent: I ran a successful business for many years that provided high level IT consulting and support services where I made it a point to touch bases with my client’s key contact person(s) every two weeks or so regardless of what we were doing for them. It was something I knew they appreciated because they told me it was appreciated. One of the most frequent compliments we received was that we kept in touch. And that was because our calls (in their words) let them “know we were still around” and “thinking about them.” So it was reassuring.
And it also netted my company a good deal of additional business. Because our client contacts (who genuinely were very busy people) knew they didn't need to remember to call us. They’d let our periodic calls to them serve as a reminder they needed us to do something for them. One client called it her “human tickler file.”
Now if you see a Sweetwater rep as just a salesperson you’re missing out on a lot of what they can do for you. I see mine as my music gear consultant. He sees more gear than I ever will, and has access to information I’d have to run all over the web or make multiple queries on my own dime to get at. So I just call and ask my questions and either get immediate answers, or I get passed over to someone else there who can help me out.
Which is how my own company conducted business. We wanted to serve as your one-stop shop and information resource for the services and products we handled. And that extra convenience and serving as a free source of solid reliable information allowed us to keep our existing customers while gaining us profitable new ones. Which was a good thing. Because we never advertised, didn’t have a public web presence (although we did have a private secure client portal), nor a business directory listing. All our business came from referrals from our existing clients and word of mouth. One client called us the “best kept non-secret going” for what we did.
So I guess our personal touch service and stealth marketing approach paid off. Or at least it did with the people we wanted to do business with.
) "I'm calling about your past due credit card.. could you give me the number so I can verify that?" (I have no credit card, dufus. But here's a number for you... 8 6 7 5 3 0 9 
), so on so forth. I used to answer those calls, once upon a time before I brightened up. It's far better for my health, sanity, and blood pressure if I simply do not answer them, rather than answering, calling the scammer a dirty son of a *****, and hanging up.
