Reading Seth Godin’s post today I couldn’t help but nod. He explains about the hassle he’s recently been through trying to get B2B firms the details they will require to give him a quote:

I visited eight sites. Six of them hide their email address. They use forms of one sort of another. One firm refused to accept more than 500 characters in the "how can we help you" box, while three of them wanted to know what state I was in, etc.

Email contact is like a first date. If you show up with a clipboard and a questionnaire, it’s not going to go well, I’m afraid. The object is to earn permission to respond.

He goes on to explain a very simple way to filter out the inevitable spam that will result from such. Noting that:

Sure, you’ll get a lot of spam, but deleting spam is a lot easier than finding customers.

Now personally I have no problem with contact forms – I use them myself, but what is really annoying is going to the effort of contacting companies, filling in their forms and then hearing absolutely nothing from them. In the last three weeks I’ve contacted around 40 firms that appear from their websites to be suitable vendors, for various quotes/to see if they can supply various products or services and a mere two have actually responded. Sadly one of those was an automated message informing me that Bob Smith (name changed to protect the guilty) was on holiday and would respond when he returned on the 28th September (he hasn’t).

So please if you’re going to invest in a website as part of your marketing (which you damn well should) invest the extra few hours (that’s all it’ll take) to make sure that the email address/contact form goes through a good spam filter and then ends up in the inbox of someone who is able to respond. Better yet enter the email into a CRM system and ensure someone manages the system – you can get some pretty damn good open source ones for FREE so the cost isn’t even an excuse!

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