I’m not your prospect. Yet.

Believe it or not, the contact options on my website are for people who wish to buy my products or services. Indeed, I’ve never seen a web site whose contact form said, “Please pitch me your product or services.”

If you think that my website is here for your prospecting purposes, then your misunderstanding runs very, very deep.

If you seriously want to contact me to pitch something, find some other way to reach me. I’ve got a web footprint the size of a small country. You’ll find a way. It’s not that hard.

Make your pitch highly relevant. If you say “I can help you get more Google ranking for your important keywords,” I will have nothing but contempt for you. If you say, “You clearly are trying to dominate the widget space. Acme Widgets currently owns the keyword COYOTE CONTRAPTIONS. If you ranked for that, you could get 194.5% more business. Would you like to talk about SEO services?” I’ll be impressed. I’ll be impressed, but I’ll still say “No.”

Why? Because anyone who offers a solution without understanding whether I have the problem they’re solving isn’t likely to offer a quality solution. If I’m not worth your time to do enough research to make it clear that your product will be valuable to me, how can it be worth my time to meet with you?