It’s hard to find the help these days

This is more of a personal email, as I am (hopefully; this was written last week) taking a break. The subject line for this email I overheard on one of my first jobs, where a furious salesperson shouted down the phone at a would-be (and I’m guessing never was) customer 😬. It was a curious sales tactic, which got me thinking.

Most days, I receive 5-15 sales emails. How I react is a function of:

😬 Sleep deprivation

😬 Workload

😬 Grumpiness

And just a smattering of rational analysis.

Some do make me smile. Like one I received a few weeks back, using a sketchy Gmail address (b2btopdatalists) to sell me the names of delegates to a global fraud prevention conference. Selling (most likely) fraudulently obtained names for a fraud conference to people you’ve identified as preventing fraud is a ballsy move…

Then there are the emails I keep because they’re inspirationally hopeless, like this:

Should I let this person take over the weekly newsletter to get more “sells”!? To their credit, my first name is right (Rubert is a standard first salvo).

I try to remember there is a poor soul (or maybe a bot?) behind these emails.

In year one of this business someone objected to a LinkedIn advert we ran where the call to action was a button consenting to be contacted about scheduling a possible demo titled, “Book a demo”. This person looked me up and wrote an angry message, explaining they’d expected more details, not, errr, a booking form for a demo. 🤷🏻‍♂️

Receiving that email, even if it confused me, was chastening.

A few weeks later, on LinkedIn, I saw a mutual contact had liked a post by the person who sent the angry message as they announced their involuntary redundancy. Maybe the ad was unclear, but my timing had been inadvertently awful.

There is a point to the rambling. I hear from my clients that you receive many sales emails, too. That is seldom framed as a positive. We all have so much going on in our lives (good and bad). So, how should I reach people sensitively?

70% of our work is referrals; the rest comes from this newsletter, free assessments, public speaking, LinkedIn, or social proof (seeing someone else’s testimonial). With that in mind, here’s a quick survey to try and help me help you by getting better quality content to you: