Industrial buyers do not want the Web sites they use to search products and services to disturb them and those that do risk of losing prospective customers, according to ThomasNet. According to the firm’s industrial purchasing barometer survey, 90% of industrial buyers go online first to narrow their list of suppliers before calling them but: *Seventy-seven percent of respondents don’t want to be contacted at all, while 56% of respondents do not want vendors to contact them until they have made the initial contact, while 21% do not want to be contacted at all, a tenfold increase over the past three years. *A full 89% of respondents prefer complete anonymity and virtually all (95%) want information sent only when they request it, continued the survey. *More than four out of five respondents (81%) said they would not return, or would be unlikely to return, to a Web site that reveals their identities to suppliers. The survey polled 805 industrial executives and engineers nationwide in July.
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