Any salesperson who spends time trying to cold call into organizations can tell you how frustrating it can be.

Between voice mail and human sentries, companies can seem like fortresses that are built around one principle: keep outsiders OUT!

When you consider it, this is both understandable and foolish.

Executives and their helpers might be bombarded by distractions and endless suitors if they took to heart the advice offered by author Robert Townsend, to be heroes and to answer their own phones.

When would they ever get done what theyre paid to do?

At the same time, keeping all outside influences out is not only, strictly speaking, impossible; but it is self-defeating.

Dont you want to hear about the latest breakthroughs in productivity? If you completely insulate yourself from the outside world, you might be stuck in yesterdays rut.

Salespeople, among other things, bring important industry and even broader news with them when they knock on the door, ring you up on the phone, or send a mailer.

For this reason, I believe it is high time larger companies establish a new post.

Just as countries have diplomats to normalize and optimize relations beyond their borders, corporations should offer a new functionary:

AMBASSADOR TO THE OUTSIDE WORLD.

Salespeople, potential project partners, and others could contact this agent, describe their objective and be instructed in how to proceed. The best opportunities could be seized, and the Ambassador, being wise and all-knowing about the company, could politely discourage or reroute the least promising queries.

Some might tell me that such people already exist and theyre called SECRETARIES and RECEPTIONISTS.

In a more genteel time this was true.

But alas, most of them are on the outside now, their jobs having been usurped by electronics, and theyre wondering along with the rest of us how to penetrate these fortresses!