Why Sales Pros Hate Instant Messaging
The results of my highly unscientific poll suggest that, while sales pros have love email and cellular phones, they hate Instant Messaging, at least when it comes to selling. IM got ranked on the bottom, or near the bottom, by nearly every person who commented.
Why is IM disliked? I would guess that this because IMs can so easily go wrong, especially in the hands of a novice.
Oddly, the telephone was once considered a "non-professional" means of communication. When first introduced in businesses, a clerk at business A would call a clerk at business B in order to dictate a message from one manager to another.
The business folk of the time were afraid they might say something that would be misconstrued. Social intercourse was very much a face-to-face activity involving many complex social cues. Without those cues, people felt lost. It was weird talking to a disembodied voice.
Today, of course, an entire set of social conventions and cues have emerged around the use of the telephone. Everyone knows (and understands) the implication of how the phone is answered (i.e. "Helloooo!!!" versus "What.") , the subtle cues that signal that the other person should now speak, the slightly raised voice tonality that says "we're wrapping this up," etc.
Sales pros used to think about emails unprofessional, too. Back when the technology was new, it was gauche to send important business communications via email. If it was "official," , it went out on letterhead, even if faxed. It's really only been in the past few years that email has become acceptable as a primary form of business contact.
Email wasn't accepted immediately because it was so easy to screw up. Email encouraged (and encourages) sloppy thinking and sloppy writing. And then there's the problem of unintentional mail bombs. A hard copy letter gives you time to decide whether you really want to tell the boss that he's full of, well, nonsense. By contrast, an email shoots off like lightning and you typically can't get it back.
Today, a set of social conventions has emerged around the proper use of email in a business context. (E.g. Include a personal message to ensure that the reader doesn't think it's SPAM. Only include a smiley if you've established a more casual relationship, etc.) Most sales pros understand all of this intuitively, which is why the technology has been embraced.
I suspect that Instant Messaging is about where email was twenty years ago. As currently used and understood, IM has all the disadvantages that made email so dangerous, without providing many advantages. There are no well-understood social cues, or rules for what's appropriate, that provide a safety net for business communications. Thus it's not surprising that sales pros prefer telephone calls, emails, or face to face meetings.
Maybe IM will become more popular when regular business folk start using it more frequently. Or maybe it will be replaced by something like web conferencing (which didn't fare much better than IM in the poll, by the way.) What do you think?