It’s Time Your Sales Teams Stop Using Local Presence Deception

If you’ve never heard of local presence, it’s the strategy that many companies use to incorporate a regional presence to boost their overall brand’s trust and reliability. In a physical sense, local presence may involve establishing a brick-and-mortar store, office, or warehouse in a specific region, city, or neighborhood. This allows businesses to be physically present in the community they serve, and may help establish trust and familiarity with local customers.

In a virtual sense, local presence may refer to the use of localized marketing and advertising strategies, such as using local language, tailoring content to a specific region, or leveraging popular social media platforms in that area.

Local Presence Deception

Local presence deception uses local phone numbers or IP addresses to create the impression of physical presence in a specific location, even if the business is actually located elsewhere. It’s not just businesses that deploy this methodology; online scammers do too. In fact, my own mother was sadly deceived by a man she thought lived in the same community. He actually lived halfway around the globe and was utilizing her local area code with Google Voice to deceive her (and other victims).

The goal, of course, is to have a victim or unsavvy prospect answer the phone simply because they recognize the area code. And it appears to have been effective for quite some time…

People are nearly four times more likely to answer calls from local numbers. Only 7% said they’re likely to answer a call from an unknown caller with a toll-free area code—but that number leaps to 27.5% when the unknown caller is using a local area code.

SoftwareAdvice

While local presence can be an important factor in building brand recognition, establishing customer trust, and improving sales and revenue in a particular region or community, local presence deception has the opposite effect.

Why It’s Time To Ditch Local Presence Deception

As a marketer, it’s always strange to me that I’d have to debate someone over whether deception is a viable marketing strategy. It’s not, especially in this day and age. If the strategy of local presence is to establish customer trust… deception is the absolute destruction of it. Let’s discuss some additional reasons to end this strategy:

Reason 1: Sales Is About Trust

Much of what makes modern sales professionals successful is their ability to quickly build trust with their prospects. This quote is dead on:

Sales is about building relationships: either a meaningful long-term relationship that proves to be fruitful for many years, or a short-term transactional relationship where you’ve built enough rapport a customer is willing to give you money in exchange for goods. Both cases require a certain level of trust. Without it, the exchange of money (which is what you want) for the goods (that they want) will never take place.

Pouyan Salehi

If you have an amazing sales representative, the last thing you want to do is set them back before they even have a chance to build a rapport with the prospect.

Reason 2: You’re Putting Your Brand’s Reputation At Risk

We no longer live in a world where companies’ deceptive practices go unheard. Both businesses and consumers alike already despise getting interrupted on their phones all day. And they discuss these findings in reviews, across social media, and in their industry communities.

Reason 3: You’re Not Fooling Anyone

The research shows that when the caller learns the solicitor is from out of state, they hang up about half the time. You just took a prospect that may have been viable, and you angered them to the point of hanging up.

Sure, it may take a few more calls, an email, or even direct marketing to capture their attention… but is that better than destroying any chance of doing business with them in the future?

Reason 4: Sales Forces Are Remote

Consumers and businesses alike have grown accustomed to having online meetings and working with people across the globe. It’s not as much of an advantage to be down the block as in a different time zone as it once was.

1. According to a Salesforce report, 62% of salespeople were working remotely in 2020, up from 33% in 2019. This suggests that remote work has become more prevalent in the sales industry in recent years.
2. A LinkedIn survey found that 59% of sales professionals were working remotely in 2020, up from 28% in 2019. This indicates that remote work has become more common in the sales industry due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
3. Another study by McKinsey & Company found that 20-25% of sales roles could be fully remote in the long term, while an additional 25-30% could be partially remote. This suggests that remote work will likely remain a significant part of the sales industry even after the pandemic subsides.

The fact is that remote sales are here to stay. Consumers and businesses alike will become accustomed to seeing different area codes pop up on their phones… and they may even answer them!

Reason 5: There’s No Data On Lost Sales

While local presence is consistently advertised as a feature to get more prospects to answer the phone, there’s no data on lost sales. In fact, you’ll never know! In fact, only 2% of survey recipients said they’d be more likely to do business, while 41% clearly stated they’d be less likely to do business.

It’s time for companies to abandon the deception of local presence and protect their brands, their reputations, and the talent their sales representatives have for building trust.