Here at the Coaching Blog- one of the world’s leading blogs on the subject of Leadership and Coaching we quite often post articles by leading authors and authorities- today we are delighted to post an article from Medium.com by Jon Westenberg.
I’m more than a sales target. Act like it.
I carried out an experiment on Twitter over the last week. I started Mass following a bunch of digital marketers, to see what would happen. I wanted to gauge the way the supposed experts in marketing reacted to their new audience members.
It was a fucking depressing experience. I followed 150 digital marketers, and I received 100 automated tweets and direct messages back. Some of these were multiple messages from the same people. One idiot automatically sent me three seperate messages within 5 minutes of following him.
Why would this ever work? Who would ever respond positively to being spammed by a bunch of people they’ve tried to connect with? Who would ever use a vendor who showed so little interest in them as people that they completely automated their interactions?
I started thinking about the way automation can dehumanise marketing and sales in a way that rejects and alienates people. It’s what you get when you view talking to people as being a quantity over quality equation. It’s what you get when you don’t spend time with your audience in a meaningful way, and instead view them as a collection of dollar signs who don’t matter to you as people.
But it’s not purely an automation thing. It’s a classic sales and marketing mistake. It’s the same thinking that drives pointless, inhuman, boiler room sales tactics and teams. It’s the same thinking that startups, corporations and total assholes use when they don’t have any real respect for the people who buy their products and services.
