Misuse of Data and Real Men Don’t Need Leads

An opinion expressed by Anthea Stratigos, Co-founder & CEO of Outsell, Inc.

Real Men Don’t Need Leads and they don’t need to commit crimes for them either.

Mark Zuckerberg, shame on you and shame on the culture you’ve fostered that would think using tax data is OK on the heels of Cambridge Analytica. Your culture is toxic, and so are you.

While people dive into Threads in droves, this goes on. I hope they shut it all down or at least issue big, big fines or put a few people in prison and throw away the key. Once again, it will probably be the EU who has to discover something like this in their part of the world and do the dirty work for the rest of the world. But seriously, this is sickening.

How did we get to this? I was thinking about it the other day as I was talking to my London colleague who like me is old school when it comes to sales. Help people solve real problems, solution sell and challenge sell, which really is about service and treating people as you’d wish to be treated.

The young bucks come into sales and the first thing they ask is where are my leads? Bah! Do the work people.

He said, “I never had a lead in my life.” He ran his own business, and so do I. Before that I sold corporate training programs on straight commission for the American Management Association for a year as an agent in between exec jobs in the early ’90s.

Every morning faxes would whir off my home office fax machine — all from their public training and catalog business which was an engine with hundreds of courses and trainers and thousands of programs around the world.

I was an agent for Nor Cal — they had contractors based geographically who sold their corporate training. There were 20 or so of us. We got faxes but were straight commission. I sold more than $700K in courses my first year as a contractor. I can tell you the faxes helped, but they didn’t do the selling.

After that year (and before) I never had another lead in my life. I had referrals, people finding us and asking for solutions. Or us reaching out with a suggestion they may have similar needs as other clients (name a few real problems) and do they have 15 minutes to see if there’s a “there” there?

But leads? Interest like AMA gave us? Great. But this whole modern-day machine that has gotten so bad people are targets instead of flesh and blood with real problems to solve, or experiences to remember, or purchases they need (or want) is a travesty.

We have lost our way. MarTech stack, first-party vs. third-party, MQL, SQL, marketing services (nothing about buying services here!), intent data, and on and on. Even the terminology sanitizes and techifies all this. We have become initials.

We have lost our way. The young bucks don’t know how to do it old school and the tech firms have sucked enterprises so far into the abyss some of them are willing to sell, or give, tax return data to Meta, for god’s sakes, so other enterprises can fund Meta. Nonsense. Users wake up and walk away and companies please move marketing spend to more legit players or to finding customers a better way.

Yes, awareness is important. Discovery is fine. I want to find you at my point of need, but I don’t want to be harassed. Tracked. And I really don’t want you having my tax returns. I can’t even read AP without the same Google ad coming up thinking I’m a guy and wanting me to build muscle.

Not sure what the universe’s message is in all that, but every time I see that ad, I play the same game and hit the ad-not-appropriate button or seen-this-ad before button, and it keeps coming up. Even email marketing has become a sinkhole. I unsubscribe to everything and still each day the whackamole continues. In all my years at Outsell I can recall two cold-call emails I responded to. The rest? As good as spam. That’s what we’re doing to people when we pray and spray, render them to initials, and think we’re going to bait them by “nurturing.” Let’s not kid ourselves — none of this is about nurturing.

I know darn well there are only machines behind that Google and unsubscribe process. I don’t have a human on the planet I can send a note to let alone talk with. I’m about to toss the AP app from my phone but since I’m on a news diet it’s the last source I read that’s centrist. I like AP. But that ad process is bunk. And someone someplace is making money and thinking it works. No muscle-building protein powders required here folks.

Chuck Richard, long retired from Outsell, used to say, “Why can’t we flip the model to asking for what someone is in the market for vs. all this cajoling, pushing, prodding, and bothering?” I wrote moons ago about finding my white sweater.

More like that please. Enough already. This marketing nonsense has to stop. Let’s help real people with real problems solve them with their permission.

Source: Outsell Inc.

Anthea Stratigos is a Silicon Valley CEO, wife, mother, public speaker, and writer, among many other passions and pursuits. She is Co-founder & CEO of Outsell, Inc., the leading research and advisory firm focused exclusively on the data, information, and analytics industry.

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