How to fend off the construction marketing scammers?

You receive the intrusive calls and emails every week (perhaps every day).  Someone is offering you an opportunity to achieve "Page 1 ranking" on Google.  Or someone is telling you that for a modest fee, you can be introduced to the movers and shakers within your client community at a special invitation-only conference.  I've been "invited" to China several times in the past year.

Now, certainly some offers that you receive are truly worthy of consideration.  And I certainly have some respect (and perhaps pity) for the underpaid minions hired to make the inconvenient marketing calls.  (I can't say so much positive for the scamming spammers, however.)

The telemarketers, canvassers and spammers market with the numbers game.  They figure that if they make enough calls or send enough emails, someone will bite.  The cost per lead influences the strategy, as does sales training for the telemarketers and copy writing skills (and coding abilities) for the spammers -- especially successful ones that are able to evade your spam blocks.

I have a simple solution for these operations and virtually all inbound solicitations.  Ignore them UNLESS they can in their first sentence identify a credible person who you respect as a referring source, and provide a real reason for doing business with them.

Heck, that is a blunt rule, but it has a corollary.  In your marketing, unless you can achieve the same relationship focus with your outbound direct sales calls and messages, you should stop, take a cold, hard look at your priorities, and reset your strategies.  (Unless they are currently working, in which case, well, I suppose you are succeeding at the numbers-game approach to marketing.)

If you rethink the process then you will see how a much more effective direct sales marketing campaign can start -- with your existing, truly satisfied clients.

Ask them for their help in spreading the word.  Obtain referrals, references, and reputation back-up.  Then you can call -- and drop the names which matter the most to your potential clients (outside their own names, of course.)

Does this approach work?  Well, most of our own sales result from phone calls, faxes and emails.  Many are to people with whom we have done business in the past, but at least 25 to 30 per cent a month are brand new potential clients.  However, we always call on reference from someone they know and respect.  You can do the same thing, yourself -- and ignore the others.

Learning marketing lessons from the scammers

As construction industry marketers, should we spend some time learning the scammers' tricks? This is a challenging question because, of course, great scammers are also brilliant marketers.

They are able to pull the wool over your eyes enough that you part with your money and beliefs for something that is only in their self-serving imagination.

Scammers, of course, distort the concept of trust -- they win your trust through trickery and psychological manipulation, and then destroy it. Scammers create fear in the marketplace. You distrust strangers, "too good to be true" marketing messages, and sales pitches. Trouble is, the best scammers are your "friends" -- or worse, convince your real friends that they are for real, so they become unwitting agents of the original scammer in pushing the fraudulent arrangements (Bernie Madoff.)

Notably, of course, (especially in the online world) scammers are willing to spend an inordinate amount on marketing. Some of the best online scams design "fake newspapers" and then hype the traffic to the phony publications with expensive keyword advertising, paying rates no one else would spend.

These high budgets cause the scammers' ads to appear as paid links at the top of real listings, and start people down the path of some very bad relationships. They especially prey on the vulnerable with "work at home" offers. (Does that say something about what a disturbingly large percentage of the community and market really wants -- yes, to "work" at home without really working, and make lots of money doing it. Dream on!)

In this environment we have the choice of copying the scammers' best techniques but with honourable objectives -- or we can learn enough from them to understand the power of psychological manipulation and control.

Integrity

The stories this week out of Wall Street and Toronto about Bernard Madoff and Marc Dreier touch close to the heart of business. Wealthy, successful, incredibly intelligent people -- purportedly playing by the rules -- have been arrested and charged with serious criminal fraud offences and (formerly) wealthy investors in their schemes face extreme hardship and perhaps destitution.

Why?

What causes people with purportedly excellent reputations to turn out 'bad' (the individuals named here of course are considered innocent until proven guilty in a court of law), and why do people with wealth, intelligence, and capability fall for what are, in effect, scams?

I wish I had an answer, but expect we will find more stories of this sort as the economic recession deepens and problems patched up in an environment of growing wealth are exposed in declining markets. And some of these stories will touch closer than we like to the AEC community. (Note: I have no evidence or even a hint of wrongdoing anywhere within our community, so the previous remark is speculation, not fact.)

Some people are corrupt all along, putting up a show of integrity where, underneath the surface, they are true psychopaths. Others slip gently at first over the line, then fall deeper and deeper into the morass of crime. (And unless you are Mother Teressa, I suspect you've crossed the line at least a few times in your life, only to recover and return to respectability -- just avoiding the one step too far, where your integrity is compromised by the ongoing reality of your circumstances. Yes, you can interpret the previous remark autobiographically, but don't expect me to be totally clear about my transgressions in this public forum.)

Can you avoid being a victim of fraud? And can you decide where the point of stretching the truth just a little, goes beyond fair play and into the realm of dishonour? I won't give a perfect answer here, but offer some thoughts which you will observe are founded in common sense and Jewish values.

If it is too good to be true, it usually (but not always) is.
Beware of gifts from strangers (and exceptional gifts from friends) and beware of short term gain with long-term pain. If someone promises and seems to deliver amazingly good results, stand back and ask if the story is real. Sometimes of course really good stuff happens. Enjoy it.

Trappings are not substance.
Look at where things really are. I know you expect an investment advisor or bank to have a high class establishment, but when you are doing business with real business people, they will often operate in much more modest circumstances.

Know your stuff, and know how to assess people who know stuff you don't know.
That is quite a phrase, but you have a responsibility to not assume anything. I am not a medical doctor, for example, but certainly can research the norms of good health and potential problems -- and also assess whether the doctor is a good at diagnosing.

Put all your eggs in one basket, then remove some of them.
What I mean here is that you need to become great at your chosen field - your objective is to be truly at the peak of your profession, business, or craft -- but you then need to take a few 'eggs' out of that for your investments, and spread them around a little. This way, if something goes wrong in your primary space, you will feel hardship, but not destitution. You will live for another day.

I believe most people are good, most of the time. Most of us live within values of integrity, fair play, and humanity and respect, and share these values with our families, friends, and business associates. A few people are really bad, and a few people are perfect -- I'm neither. You may still be victims of crooks, even if you adapt the ideas expressed here, but I think your chances of victimization and (worse) destitution are much lower if you use some common sense and remember the basics.

Scams

Alas, hard times also bring out hard people. When you get desperate for business, for opportunities, the dishonest play to your emotions, with enticing and apparently appealing offers for work, bidding opportunities, or new business.

With experience hopefully you know what seems fishy -- stuff out of the blue which looks too good to be true, or is just plain unexpected but 'good', often isn't.

Your usual first line of defence in fighting scams is to check with people you know and trust -- hopefully you've already built a network of professional advisers (including your accountant and lawyer). They are trained to think conservatively, and usually are.

Unfortunately, the worst and most difficult scams catch the vulnerable in positions of trust. When a scam infects a church group or community organization, it can spread like wildfire because people believe and trust their peers and colleagues.

Be wary of any situation where you ship goods or provide services to people you don't know; any arrangement where you are spending money on "finders fees" for further opportunities, any situation where you just hope it is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Sometimes it is. Read the postings at the beginning of the blog and you'll see how, at the bottom of a self-induced business collapse, amazing things happened, suddenly, and wonderfully, to restore the business. So, in a moment of vulnerability you may confuse a scam for serendipity.

(I think the sign that the matter is serendipitous rather than a scam is that a variety of unrelated amazing and positive things from different sources happen at exactly the same time -- the opposite of the perfect (negative) business storm. If you see surprisingly good news happen on several fronts all at the same time, you truly know the tide has turned.