Are you aware that the Australian Communications and Media Authority is considering extending the do not call register to include businesses?

This means that business owners could nominate to be included on the do not call register to prevent them being contacted by other businesses for sales purposes.

Now, I'm the first to admit that I find some telemarketing approaches offensive. Particularly those that big business is often responsible for.

Being called by a heavily accented person, on a bad line reading verbatim off a script and refusing "not interested" as an answer is extremely irritating. Nobody gains anything from this type of approach.

Unfortunately small business is often the recipient of such calls yet they are potentially the organisations to be most directly disadvantaged by extending the do not call register to include businesses.

The telephone is still one of the most cost effective ways to target a new sales prospect, particularly when you are just starting out in business.

Whilst I'm a big fan of making sure you have a prospects permission before you send them communciations - often cold calling is how you get that permission in the first place.

I'm not sure what the answer to the problem is but it seems the real danger here is that a few big bad eggs are ruining the basket for small businesses.

Perhaps a solution might be for the register to exclude smaller businesses and for business owners electing to be on the register to be able to select which industries they want to avoid contact from as there are some serial offenders from certain industries.

I'm having my say here and have also responded to an Australian Direct Marketing Association survey sent by the Australian Business Women's Network.

What's your opinion?

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