My social feeds seem dominated with “hints and tips” for writing massive numbers of emails in the shortest periods of time. Today, I hit the tipping point, one was leveraging ChatGPT to write these emails.
In reading it, the author had, apparently, discovered the concept of “mail merge,” using Google tools. And creating the “killer” email message using Chat, neglecting the fact that Chat can only produce a well articulated, grammatically correct, mediocre message (I’ve written about the problems with these technologies before).
But every day, I see some expert presenting us their insights about how to produce 1000s of emails in just minutes. And, more concerning are the 100’s of likes and comments from sellers looking to immediately implement this advice. The one I saw today had over 1000 likes and over 80 comments requesting the templates. I’m just imagining the 80,000 emails these people will be generating today when they receive the template. And then, there may be the overachiever that spends 30 minutes, rather than 15 minutes.
These people never pause to think, “Why is it that we have to be sending 1000s of emails, each, every day?” They never reflect on their personal experience in being the recipient of the emails others are sending them. All of them complain about being deluged with meaningless, irrelevant emails. Yet, each of them continues to contribute to the problem!
And then, there’s the oneupmanship these experts will try. Tomorrow, I expect to see, “Write 2000 emails in 15 minutes…” and the cycle will persist.
When I start questioning these people about why they provide this advice, I get answers like, “Well sellers aren’t getting the volume of engagement they need so they have to send more emails…..”
Then I ask, “Why aren’t the recipients responding?” And the answer usually says, “Well they are getting too many emails, we need to get enough emails out there so we stand out and someone might open one…. We need to get enough people to open and respond to one, so we need to up our volume of emails…..”
Huggghhhhh?
And then they say, “But we teach them to personalize them….” And each one of these techniques shows the same “personalization” method. Insert [First Name] ….. Insert [Company Name]….. Repeat [First Name]….
Never a mention of relevance to my specific business, the issues that we have, or what I am even interested in…… Of course if the person took the time to research that, or even do some broad categorization, they couldn’t sent 1000 emails in 15 minutes.
I start thinking in B2B selling:
Why do we have to be sending 1000s upon 1000s of emails a day? Are there really 1000s and 1000s of potential buyers that we need to reach? That each seller has to reach out to 1000’s of people every week is inconceivable to me! How does that sales person ever understand the organizations they are reaching out to, the issues they are likely to be facing? How do they understand the individuals they are reaching out to and how to best engage them?
We know the answer to this—they don’t. Despite the technologies and tools available to help them do this, when they are dealing with 1000s of outreaches a week, there is no way they can do this. If they can’t do this, then how impactful will those outreaches really be?
Why do we not ask ourselves about the low response rates? We hold our sales people accountable for sending 1000s of emails every day. We know our competitors are doing the same thing, so our customers are drowning in emails saying, “We can solve your problems,” even though the senders have no idea the recipient actually has those problems. We and our competitors inflict out sequences on them. Yesterday one “guru” suggested 20-30 outreaches out performs 10-20 outreaches by double digits. We have Gartner suggesting it takes 66 outreaches to get a meeting. So for that 1000 emails we take 15 minutes to send today, we are going to inflict another 20,000, 30,0000, or 60,000 emails.
We know our own reactions to the meaningless emails inflicted on us every day, yet somehow don’t consider, “Do the people we are inflicting our emails on feel the same way?”
We know some of the large email systems or corporate email systems try to put in place tools to filter these masses of emails. And any number of “guru’s” offer tricks and techniques to get around these. Why do we have to adopt email artifices/gimmicks to avoid having corporate email systems treat our emails as spam?
I’m sorry, but B2B selling is broken!
That our only strategy for making our numbers is ever increasing volumes of outreaches, sequences, cadences. That we seek to add 1000s more to our lists every day. That we focus on tools and techniques that enable us to send 1000 emails in 15 minutes. All of this should tell us that something is broken.
But we don’t pause to think about this, we don’t pause to consider, “Why isn’t this working? Why aren’t people responding? What might we do differently?”
Instead, we look at our social feeds. Those with the greatest number of likes, those with the greatest number of comments, those with readers saying, “This is fantastic, I’ll do it today….”
When are we going to recognize this is insane? When are we going to stop this and start engaging prospects and customers in meaningful ways?
