Also, if you are going to pounce at your company, provide sales with tested scripts so that they come off as helpful and not stalkers. And pouncers beware, I see tweets regularly from people annoyed at ‘pouncing’ who will say on Twitter that they are annoyed with X company for calling or that it’s creepy that X company is calling when they are looking on their website.

Also, it takes time to go to a website monitoring tool then go back to your CRM to look up names, then to another tool to look up names of visitors if the right one isn’t in your CRM, and then to Linkedin to find out more about those names you just downloaded. Instead, companies my find it a big timesaver to use a product like Sales Insight (by Marketo) which integrates Salesforce.com with the website monitoring information and then with tools like Jigsaw, LinkedIn, and Demandbase. I know this product has just been released, but I have been able to see how it works for the past few weeks while consulting for them, and it has proven to be a big time saver within their own org and with some of the early adopters of this new social sales technology.

Ok, so deep down, I’m a closeted pouncer. I know it, and those of you that know me know it, and those of you I’ve cold called after a site visit know it. That said, there is truth to all sides of every argument. In fact, Parker Trewin (@parker_genius) made a great analogy in a comment on the original Pounce article where he compared this scenario to ” ‘observe and serve’ approach–just like the Sales rep does at your local Nordstrom store.”

As an educated buyer, I like educated and respectful sales people. Especially if they are timely. So if I’ve looked at 4 suits on the rack, and gone back to 1 of them to try it on, it wouldn’t bother me if someone walked up and said “Let me help you with that. It’s the finest worsted wool from New Zealand…” You get the point.

So if you are going to Pounce, then do as Craig says, “Pounce with class.”