Wlauzon - 10:11 pm on Jan 20, 2009 (gmt 0)

...if you do not get a human after the first 10 rings, you can leave a voicemail....

Of which has about a 35% chance of ever being returned, in my experience.

On emails, I was not referring to "blind" emails sent to something like "sales@mywebsite.com". In many cases I had actually called and gotten a contact email of what was supposed to be a live person. In one case just last week I talked to a person and he was supposed to email me updated availability in a few minutes - I am still waiting.

And you don't have to personally respond to each and every email you get for products you don't carry - as someone else noted above, all you have to do is make up a canned response about sorry, etc. We find that 2-3% of those turn into sales (have you ever searched the web for something and accidently found something else you can't live without?).

As a side note, I am always amazed at how many companies send out emails and don't have some kind of signature about both their email address and website.

[edited by: Wlauzon at 10:13 pm (utc) on Jan. 20, 2009]