Slot Grope Protection

A couple of fellow sellers running significant shows of their own alerted me to the ballooning of this latest most unsavoury digital direct mail tactic.

A wholly unsolicited calendar invite appears in your schedule. Blocking off a specific, freshly allotted slot. The event titled with brazenly cold-call bombast.

You cancel the first such appearance, baffled. Then, when they land daily, you seethe.

How on earth can any outreach pro consider this good selling?

How can directly violating anyone's private space this way be acceptable? Terms already arisen such as calendar spam, hijack or darts should give clear indication as to its beyond the pale place.

Worse still, to defend yourself through declining can notify the sender that the address is live so encouraging more unconsented attention.

This isn't turbo-charged traditional cold calling. It's a sinister, separate strain of unannounced approach. Less foot-in-the-door more tucked-up-in-bed. A mutation sadly fuelled in part by the nascent Sales AI explosion.

Depressingly, outreach automation vendors (I cannot bear to name) trumpet this very capability with typical confidence; '5–10× more meetings than cold email'.

You can also find claims that through this tactic the standard <3pc hit rate now lifts to a (seemingly unverifiable) trebling of that.

Hope the barrage may have reached peak slot grope comes from email providers preventative actions. With settings and automatic barriers alike allowing for instance, only those known to you such calendar access. But we must both stay vigilant if we are salesperson with a buying budget, and ensure we never deploy such despicable diary intrusion ourselves.

I'm a longtime solution seller. Not a DM expert. On which tons of 'best practice' and 'proven' angles abound online. None of it includes slot grope.