Trick Or Treat?

This morning, as a drank my morning coffee, I went through my email and social feeds. You can guess what I encountered.

At first I chuckled, I thought, “These people have a great sense of humor and irony! Who could imagine such really awful prospecting. They must be playing with Halloween and “Trick or Treat.”

In the spirit of the Holiday, I responded to a few.

One email was:

Hey David – I can get 5Da612E7B495Bc000168C6Ba 3 new clients each month with our guided interview system. Takes less than 90 min of your time and you can leverage the assets forever. Open to hearing more?

I responded in my best R2D2 mode:

Dear 7Zc591L4F283Gs567432H8Mt, I’m a little confused by your marketing technique. Our customers tend to like being referred to by their name, not some code string. What am I missing? Do you treat all your customers as inanimate code strings? Curious, yours truly. 5Da612E7B495Bc000168C6Ba

I haven’t gotten a response yet, I suspect my response did not compute.

Another went:

Hi David, As a CIO for a B2B company, you’re tasked with identifying the best software for your sales and product teams…

I had a momentary identity crisis, Me a CIO?????!!!! No wonder we are having problems. While the company is actually very interesting to me, this demonstration of their poor utilization of their own tools caused me to have second thoughts and I immediately spammed it.

Or another:

David: As an active thought-leader in the spaces of benefits, employees, and insurance, your perspective has always stood out!I’m reaching out today with research in the space of employee benefits.

And I could go on and on and on.

Then I go to my LinkedIn feeds. I see post after post on sequencing and ramping the volumes. I see miracle cures in emails, social, and other channels, “Just do this…”

And then I see the data, “People are seeing 1000-1400 touches per opportunity…” And the responses are “AI helps us do more. Very few responses around “Stop the insanity!!”

People can’t be so consistently incompetent.

For a moment, I thought, all of this is serious intent, how can it bee so bad? What am I missing.

Then I realized. They must be playing a huge Halloween prank on me, “Trick or Treat!”

I almost fell for it. People can’t be so consistently incompetent. If they are using the tools, they can’t be so badly mistaken. I realized the joke is on me! Thankfully, Halloween just comes around once a year.

Perhaps tomorrow the prospecting will return to the normal quality I have come to respect. Perhaps my LinkedIn feeds, will be dominated by by thoughtful discussions about how to really connect with customers and produce results. Can’t wait…

Afterword: If you are looking for redeeming value in this post—nothing new at all, just my whining… Trick or Treat! 😉