We all hear of horror stories of journalists being incredibly rude to PRs and many of us have experienced, first hand, exasperation turn to frustration turn to rage after unwittingly selling-in the tenth survey of the afternoon.

But recently I’m beginning to understand how they feel and to be honest wonder how they manage not to slam the phone down after two minutes of stumbling over the first sentence of a pitch.

As we near the end of the year many industry bodies and magazines start planning their awards ceremonies and with that comes the invitation to “take a table” at the event to PRs and the clients they represent.

I have had two already today and the pitching has been so woeful it’s a wonder how they manage to fill the smallest of venues.

The first one:

Sales: “Hi is this Dan”
Me: “Yes”
S: “Yes…er…hi….um…I’m not sure what clients you look after but we’re holding the xxxx 2008 awards in December. Have you heard of them?”
M: “Yes”
S: “Would you like to book a table?”

Second one:

Sales: “Hi I’m xxxxx and I’m calling about the xxxx Awards 2008″
Me: “Hi”
S: “Yes, we would like to invite you to the awards ceremony as I understand you represent xxxx”
Me: “Oh okay, sounds interesting. Could you send me an email with some more details?”
S: “Sure. How do you spell your company name?”

Neither is good but the second is better than the first purely because the sales rep decided to invite me rather than expect me to open up my cheque book within 30 seconds of picking up the handset.

The first rule of selling whether it’s a product or a story is knowing and understanding the audience you are selling to. And I don’t mean knowing what journalists or PRs like, I mean actually knowing who the person on the end of the phone is, who they are, where they work, what they work on and any other insights that are readily available through the magic of Google!

Not knowing who my clients are is annoying but forgivable. There is not central database for PRs however if you don’t know then why not ask. In fact that would be a good way of opening up some kind of dialogue. Not knowing how to spell the name of the company I work for is inexcusable. I know I’m one on a list of hundreds to receive a phone call that day but it doesn’t mean I want to feel like one.

When you’re asking for £3k+ to attend an event, a little bit of desk research is the absolute minimum I expect.

It’s the same for journalists - by doing some simple searches and gathering a little background knowledge I have found the levels of receptiveness and conversion increase vastly. It’s all to easy, when faced with a media list of hundreds, to try and rattle through as many as possible as quickly as possible (gotta get in before they go to conference) but a client would be much happier you called 10 and secured five pieces of coverage than called 100 and got nothing.

Note: I have not included the names of people or specifics about the events as I have used the experiences to make a point and don’t think it is necessary to publicly bash them.