Here let me read it to you

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Desperate, needy email pickup lines

If I haven’t replied to your email, I’m not ignoring you. I’m just hacking my way through an inbox wall of needy, desperate sales pitches.

“Just re-upping this to the top of your inbox in case you missed my earlier email.”

“How would you like a $100 Uber Eats gift card to join our learning webinar?”

“Hey there, just wanted to check if my last message got lost in the Bermuda Triangle of your inbox. Should I send a search party? Haha.”

Not exaggerating for effect here, these are straight cut’n’pastes. That last one feels straight out of a 90s pickup-line manual.

“Are your eyes the Bermuda Triangle? Because I’m lost in them.”

“No.”

I don’t read any of those emails, and I don’t answer calls from phone numbers I don’t recognise. I’m assuming most people don’t either. I feel for anyone whose job requires answering calls from the general public in case it’s a customer. I’m guessing the ratio is ten wine clubs for every potential buyer.

Sales reps gotta sell

I know sales reps gotta sell. It’s a noble job, one that gets zero gratitude from anyone else in the organisation.

Nobody in the operations or finance departments sees that regular salary landing in their bank account and thinks: thanks sales team for the reliable revenue that makes this possible, appreciate your hard work!

But growth hackers have poisoned email and phone to the point where they’re close to unusable. Where the mildest contact with any company means a lifetime of automated harassment.

If you did one of the endless junk surveys you get each day, I’m pretty sure you’d get another email ten minutes later, asking you how was your survey experience?

In the quest for short-term gains for their own, individual brand, they’ve created a system where cold phone and email will never work for anyone again.

Well this took quite a turn

I’ve been in business a thousand years so I’m quite hard to surprise. Yet about once a month I hear about something that makes me go: how the fuck is that a thing?

We have an enquiry form in our digital campaigns where customers can arrange a chat about their event.

A few weeks back an online lead booked a call with one of our sales team. He started by asking her about our services. Good start. Then he launched into a long missionary spiel, on the benefits of his chosen lord and saviour.

Apparently it’s a known evangelistic strategy, finding new prospects who are obliged to listen to you for a while. Drawn from the target market of “all humans on earth”.

I’m not here to mock anyone’s choice of religion. But please: this is not the time.

Skeezy tricks from Open AI and others

With each new skeezy trick to get under your radar, your defence shields just tighten up. You don’t know who to trust.

You certainly can’t trust most things big tech serves up.

In last week’s blog, I nominated Open AI’s Sam Altman as Exhibit A of cold, detached lizard-people with little understanding of how real humans behave.

Just a few hours later, news broke that Open AI had lifted actor Scarlett Johansson’s voice for Chat-GPT’s new virtual personal assistant, inspired by Altman’s favourite movie Her. They had approached Johansson several times, offering a deal to use her voice.

Of course she said no. She was a key participant in the actors’ guild strike, where a major sticking point was studios using actors AI likenesses for minimal payment.

So Open AI just shipped the product with a voice indistinguishable from Johansson’s anyway, claiming it was voiced by another actor. Whose name they “could not release for privacy reasons”.

Open AI’s responses were lies all the way down.

Their whole business model is based on the standard Big Tech belief that other people’s life’s work should be free for platforms to monetise into the billions.

You think they’re going to lift a finger to stop AI-spawned misinformation that erodes people’s trust in everything they read, hear or see?

Trust in the six fingers of bravery

Remember last year when all your friends and Madonna were posting the heartwarming image of the Greek firefighter rescuing a small child in the Turkish earthquake?

So much love for that strong yet gentle man. Even though a quick finger count – six on the right hand – reveals he’s 100% synthetic.

That’s what business will be like in the future.

You’re not Scarlett Johansson. But it’s not going to be long before you’re having Zoom meetings with a realistic avatar face and voice that’s a long way from the actual person behind it.

If it even is a person, rather than a realistic bot.

More erosion of trust.

It’s not happening at scale yet, but now is the time to start thinking about what it means for your business and your career in the Post-Trust era.

Is your customer a raccoon?

When you’re selling, trust is the only way in. Trust will become a precious currency as we’re all overwhelmed by a tsunami of fake everything.

Trust has many dimensions.

Building a brand creates trust. It takes time, start now.

Building personal relationships take time, start that now too. Our businesses are in events, and I think they’ll become one of the last bastions of trust, where you can look people in the eye and know who you’re dealing with.

The in-person gatherings you go to now will pay off in unpredictable ways far down the track.

You get trust by giving. Not the giving of an Uber Eats card for taking a meeting, an obviously transactional deal. I think it makes the customer feel like a raccoon.

“You seem like someone who’ll meet for free food.”

Giving knowledge, time and advice with no expectation of getting something back builds trust.

Without pre-established trust, you’re pushing that sales barrow up a steep hill. It’s super hard to create trust right at that point where people want to buy.

Blind tendering: a complete waste of your time

A classic example is B2B tenders. Time-saver tip: they are an enormous amount of work. Unless you have a decent relationship with the client before the tender comes out, where you’ve established trust, don’t bother with the tender.

Because someone else is already miles ahead of you. They know the customer, the customer knows them, and you will lose.

Put that  effort into getting to know other clients who haven’t got to the tender stage. Understand them for when the opportunity comes up.

It’s a good question to ask yourself when you’re tempted to dial back a verbal deal or do some other questionable move. Will this build my trust or erode it? Your personal trust reputation, and that of your business, builds like a coral reef over years, decades.

It’s a safe bet that trust will become more and more of a precious commodity as all around us shifts.

Clients like to pretend they’re making objective, data-driven decisions but the reality is they run on powerful animal instincts going back to the dawn of time. Those instincts serve a valuable role in minimising risk, in their very survival.

Start prepping now before you’re over-run by your creepy new eleven-or-twelve fingered competition.

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