I’ve been going to Meetup groups for many years. Primarily business, entrepreneur, and software related groups. I always meet nice people, and sometimes I even come away having learned something. And even more rarely, I leave with a good connection with someone.
I recently went to an Agile Meetup and had all of those experiences – I met nice people, learned something, and made a good connection with a guy that I hope I can work with in the near future. But today, I learned something else about the meetup I went to last week. One of the women I met there was very nice and I gave her my business card. In turn, she gave my contact info to someone else for the purpose of cold-calling to sell me some “training.” Very sad. And a little frustrating.
While I do not consider myself ‘slick’, I did try to turn the conversation around on the caller. It wasn’t successful, and I had no expectation that it would be, but I wanted to make a very subtle point. The point being, that these cold-callers should, at the very least, do a LinkedIn search on a person’s name before they call.
As soon as I figured out this was a sales call, trying to be disguised as a “business opportunity”, I hit record on the call. I’ve removed the very beginning of the call, but have not changed the content otherwise. Take a listen – THEN, take note – do NOT share contact information that you collect at Meetups with OTHER people, unless they have expressly said that you can pass on their information to OTHER sales people. It’s inappropriate and wrong.
