Good morning,
In the past couple of weeks I started getting cold-calls from companies that found me through this website. Not a ton, maybe 3 a week. They start with something like, “I see you have issues with Epicor”. Usually, I can recognize these calls quickly and give the courteous “No thanks” and hangup. I just wanted to ask if other users are getting the same kinds of calls.
I don’t think there is anything we can do about it, as this is a public website, and we choose to post our issues here. Honestly, it is kind of a smart move for consultants to cold-call some of the folks here, but I am sure it must be against some kind of rule. It certainly feels wrong.
If you are one of those companies trying to pitch your consulting chops, please don’t do it with a cold-call. I will give you far more consideration if you simply send a private message in Epiusers. At least that way I know where you came from. See below.
Actually PM’ing people on the site about consulting sales is against the site rules, and will get the user banned. That can get quite annoying. Really the only way that we allow consultants to drum up business is to participate and help, then if a user wants to contact that consultant of their own motivation, that’s fair game. Other than that, this is really supposed to be more peer to peer help.
I’m not sure what we can do about cold calls outside of the site though. . Probably not much.
There’s a handful of really obnoxious unscrupulous “consultants” that try to skirt the rules on the site. Feel free to out their company name here and we’ll ban them if you got a name from the call.
I was a consultant for years and I got a metric ton of work from this forum… even back when it was Yahoo and I did it the way the rules state. Show your work, share your knowledge , prove your worth and people will reach out if / when they need help and have the budget.
Some don’t want to put in the work, that’s a real shame. I would encourage everyone if you get a cold call from a question opened in the forum report them to us and send them packing. There is plenty of great consultants and partners here on the forum that put in the time and you know what you’ll get.
That is disappointing to me and I’m sure @josecgomez@jgiese.wci and @Banderson agree. We make a effort to keep spammers and bots off the site and keep the consultants focused on participating in the forum. As @brandon said, if you can report the details, we’d ban the offender.
Everything on the site can be viewed without logging in and we are forced to use our real names so you can’t really ban anybody from doing this unless you take the site private.
Ironically when I literally posted that I needed consulting services, I got very few replies. I did get one awesome visit from amazing person (you know who you are) who could snap thier fingers on here and get a million a year consulting.
I’ve been getting those calls too, but generally cold callers only call me once. Think hooking up your ship to Marvin the Paranoid Android.
I’m a consultant here for the great help folks in this community provide. Using it as a sales tool is just bad form and doesn’t reflect well on the offending company.
And I’ve been spammed from some of those folks, too.
. Probably not much.
