Early in my career, I worked for a tiny company that exclusively built plug-ins for a specific SAAS platform. I noticed there was a public-facing page where one could search for any customer of this SAAS platform, so I built a scraper that would auto-search names, main URLs, and ticker symbols for every company on the S&P 500 into this search.
I demoed it with 5 companies to a member of the sales team, and he politely asked me to remove the script from the company laptop, and seemed to be annoyed at my script kiddie antics. He said it was nearly impossible to build a lead out of that kind of information, and that any shop that would try and use that kind of poisoned fruit would quickly tarnish their reputation.
>He said it was nearly impossible to build a lead out of that kind of information, and that any shop that would try and use that kind of poisoned fruit would quickly tarnish their reputation.
I think one of the caveats to that is good sales folks probably would do exactly as you describe. But there's always good sales folks who are making sales, and then the desperate ones who have nothing but time on their hands to try other things simply because they have time on their hands or are desperate.
That sounds like a quality sales team. Things like the OP tend to happen when you take inexperienced and desperate sales people and make them work on straight commission with no mentorship. Exactly as the person you spoke to feared, this has tarnished the reputation of the entire Canoical organization, which is exactly why you don't do that.
I demoed it with 5 companies to a member of the sales team, and he politely asked me to remove the script from the company laptop, and seemed to be annoyed at my script kiddie antics. He said it was nearly impossible to build a lead out of that kind of information, and that any shop that would try and use that kind of poisoned fruit would quickly tarnish their reputation.