Marketing automation works best when it’s backed by humans

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If you’ve followed my writing for very long, you know I’m not a big fan of automated emails. There are cases where they are done correctly and can be valuable, but the most common implementation seems to be “cool, let’s blast stuff out!”.

If you’re going to automate, I suggest two main rules:

  • Send it from a real address, not from “noreply”.
  • When someone responds, engage with them like a human.

It seems pretty easy, yes?

A few years back I shared the story for the bizarre marketing automation when I was looking to trade my car at Mountain View Ford, and now I’m back with a similar tale of woe. This time I was looking at lease rates on a Mustang Mach-E with Wade Ford, and the email automation and chaos was something to see. Here’s a quick look at what happened:

Note that the Mountain View story above was from five years ago. Surely dealerships have improved their technology since then, right? I guess not.

Again, this is very simple. I can make a case for some light automation in these kinds of situations, but the degree to which these salespeople ignore my actual requests for information is stunning.

As I mention in the video, I fear that AI is going to make this even worse. I still consider email to be the perfect vehicle (ha!) for working on a deal for a car, as the nature of asynchronous communication means that both parties can take some time to formulate offers and responses, but you can still move forward fairly quickly. It seems I’m in the minority here, but that doesn’t excuse the kind of sloppiness shown in that video.

If you want to run some automations with your company, they can be a great way to provide value — just make sure to keep some humans in the loop as well.

You can’t fix it later

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In listening to the Founders podcast, one big theme runs through almost every story that is shared — the founders become incredibly wealthy, but lose their marriage, children, and/or health as a result of it.

An example is Larry Miller, who owned the Utah Jazz. He had it all, but he had nothing. From the show:

All he did from the time his eyes opened until the time his eyes closed, he worked, did not take care of himself to the point where he’s health is so bad that he is in a motorized scooter wheelchair on the floor of the Utah Jazz, he couldn’t even move.

Eventually, he’s writing the book because he knows he’s dying, they’re chopping off parts of his body, legit, there’s no circulation in his legs, they’re like chopping off his foot, there goes your fingers. This billionaire started decomposing when he’s alive, then he doesn’t even survive long enough to finish the book, so his co-author writes last few chapters and the worst indictment and so Larry Miller says my life is cautionary tale.

I have a 30,000-square-foot house on the hill on a mountain in Utah. I own the Utah Jazz, everything. I’m perfect. And he’s like don’t do it, don’t be me. He’s like, I didn’t even have any fun in life. What’s the point of having money then, that doesn’t make any sense to me. And so what happens is the author — the co-author is talking to his wife. The last chapter is the biggest indictment.

And she’s like, well, yes, we miss him, but it’s not like he was here when he was alive. I don’t care that he had billions of dollars. He’s a failure. That’s a failure. When your wife and kids are like, I don’t even know who he is. For what? A chain of car dealerships and movie theaters and basketball teams, you have one shot at life and that’s what you did with it?

As host David Senra shared in an interview on “The Art of Investing”, of the 363 founders that he’s shared only three have done it without losing their family or their life. In David’s estimation, they are:

  • Sol Price, known for starting the “warehouse store” model, like Costco.
  • Brunello Cucinelli, who started an Italian luxury fashion brand.
  • Ed Thorp, a hedge fund manager (among other things).

The challenge for all of the rest is that they think they can ignore their families and their health for decades while they build their career, and then magically put it all back together later. From the show:

“The idea that one can go all in on career and then later reconcile it with life’s other critical priorities is both popular and seductive. It has one major shortcoming, who has ever successfully done it?”

It simply doesn’t happen. In all of the episodes that David has shared, there is literally not one example of someone who pushed everything aside, made a bunch of money, and then pulled everything back together to live happily ever after. If you want to be a Sol Price, Brunello Cucinelli, or Ed Thorp, it all needs to happen at the same time. Those men all “missed out” on some career goals because they prioritized other aspects of their life, but they still made more money than they could ever spend.

It can be tough to keep it balanced, but don’t fall prey to the idea of “I’ll just fix it later”, because no one has ever been able to do it that way before, and likely no one ever will.

The “Maker’s Schedule” vs the “Manager’s Schedule”

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When I was reading Josh Kaufman’s “The Personal MBA“, he shared this interesting viewpoint about our calendars from Paul Graham. He said:

Paul Graham, a venture capitalist, programmer, and essayist, calls this batching strategy “Maker’s Schedule/Manager’s Schedule.” If you’re trying to create something, the worst thing you can possibly do is to try to fit creative tasks in between administrative tasks—context switching will kill your productivity. The “Maker’s Schedule” consists of large blocks of uninterrupted time; the “Manager’s Schedule” is broken up into many small chunks for meetings. Both schedules serve different purposes—just don’t try to combine them if your goal is to get useful work done.

My initial reading was that most of us should work to have a “Maker’s Schedule” so we don’t kill our productivity, and perhaps that’s true, but there are big exceptions.

It reminded me of someone I worked with years ago when he was a project manager. He was a great guy and worked hard, but he tried to have a “Maker’s Schedule” and that just didn’t work for his kind of role. If you’re a project manager, you have to live by more of a “Manager’s Schedule”, where context switching IS the role. Ultimately, it led to him moving on to a different company (and a very different role) where a “Maker’s Schedule” was the proper fit for what he did.

This also has me thinking about my schedule and role. My schedule undoubtedly should be a “Maker’s Schedule” at this point, but it’s still a “Manager’s Schedule” for the most part. It’s something I need to work on, and this simple framework is helping me push it forward.

What kind of schedule do you have? Is it the right one for what you do?

But how will we track it?

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I recently saw a popular post on LinkedIn that said “To kill a great marketing idea in six words or less, just ask ‘how will we track it?’“

Initially, it sounds like a valid thought. If you can’t track it, why do it?

Tracking can be quite important, and we track all that we can, but it can lead to bad decisions. Rather than choosing the direction that is best, we often resort to choosing the direction that is easier to track.

It’s related to the idea of lift vs attribution. It’s convenient to only do things where you can track the attribution all the way through, but you’ll often miss great opportunities if you focus too hard on that.

Track everything you can, for sure, but don’t let that be the deciding factor on for your next marketing idea.

It doesn’t matter what you think your customers “should” care about

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Last month I shared a bit about how I feel the web should be these days. As I pointed out in that post, my “should” is irrelevant. I can push toward that better web to a degree, and I’ll continue to, but I also need to spend most of my time dealing with the web as it is today.

It’s similar to how our customers view our companies. There are reasons that we think they “should” view us, but those reasons don’t matter. In his book “No Bullsh*t Strategy“, author Alex Smith frames it like this:

“In either event, though, a crucial ingredient of any strategic value offering is a deep respect for the consumer – for their time, for their priorities, and even for their biases. What you think they “should” care about is nothing. What they do, in fact, care about is everything. So whatever you do, make sure you operate honestly and realistically within those boundaries.”

There are a lot of things I see companies do that are things that they feel their customers should care about. A big one is longevity, with things like “we’ve been in business for 62 years“. While that might be relevant in deeper conversations, leading with that kind of statement on your website is almost never a good idea.

A great way to uncover the real reasons that customers will care about your company can be uncovered in a solid messaging strategy, which is the main purpose of that kind of work. Uncover the real messages and focus on those first, and once you get to know your potential clients a bit more the things that they “should” care about might start coming to the surface.

Your experience is someone else’s benefit

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Many of the best businesses in the world were formed to solve a specific problem that the founder had, and then they simply worked to help others solve the the same problem. I still love the quote from Rory Vaden that I shared a few years ago when he said “You’re most powerfully positioned to serve the person you once were.“

Your past self had problems, you solved them, and now you’re in perfect position to help others through the same struggle.

In recently reading the book “Beyond the Agency Box“, author Frankie Fihn shared a similar sentiment, saying:

“Pro tip: Your experience is someone else’s benefit. Often the best people are like you were in the past or in industries you already have worked, even if it’s just as an employee. Your past experience leaves clues.”

It could be a problem you solved that led to the creation of a new company, or it could be a problem that you solved for a client a year ago that gives you insight into solving the same kind problem for a new client today. In either case, learning from your past is an incredibly powerful way to gain trust and serve others in a profound way.

Strategy lasts longer than tactics

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In recently reading Alex M H Smith’s “No Bullsh*t Strategy” he shared some interesting thoughts on strategies versus marketing tactics. In essence, his approach is that strategies should be something you set once and run for years, while the specific tactics may change quite often.

Specifically, he says:

“What you need to get comfortable with then, is this blend of stasis and movement: stasis at the strategic level, movement at the executional level. A helpful way of visualising this can be done with something I call “multi-layer pacing”, which is a fancy way of showing that the more strategic an element of the business is the less it changes, and the more tactical an element is the more it changes.“

He puts the various company efforts along a continuum, with static items on the left, moving toward more frequently changing items on the right:

Strategy –> Brand –> Product –> Operations –> Marketing

That’s not to say that things like strategy and branding should never change, because sometimes they might need to, but the further to the right you go you should be updating more often.

Apple is a great example of this.

  • Their core strategy has remained essentially the same for 50 years
  • Their brand has been refined a few times
  • They unveil a new product every decade or so
  • They change operations frequently to add new features
  • Their marketing changes constantly to showcase product revisions and new trends

Once you develop a great strategy, run with it. When you have great marketing you can also run with it, but you should measure and adapt far more frequently.

Don’t ignore the shady marketers

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I was hanging out with a friend a few weeks ago when they got an unknown call on their cell phone. With a few minutes of free time, I encouraged them to answer it to see what happened. It was a local lawyer that had seen a public record of them being in a recent (very minor) car accident, and was pushing to hear of ailments (“are you sure your neck doesn’t hurt a tiny bit?“).

My friend should have used some very unkind words with this cold-calling ambulance chaser, but instead they just gave an overly polite “No thank you”. I’m all about defaulting to kindness, but people who push spammy interruptions deserve no kindness for their acts.

In a recent episode of his “Akimbo” podcast, Seth Godin shared this excellent sentiment:

“And you will go back to business as usual because the ratchet of capitalism is inexorable. Over and over, it turns, usually in one direction, and it’s not the direction toward, I see you as a human, I treat you with respect and dignity, and you in return do the same for me. No, we’re in such a hurry to save a minute or save a dollar. We’re in such a hurry to click on that thing we want, even if we know that we are rewarding a marketer who is doing something we don’t approve of, that we keep doing it.”

Don’t reward marketers that do things that you don’t approve of. Really, any cold outreach is unacceptable and should be treated as such. Mark cold email as spam, disconnect from anyone that sends a cold DM on social media, and hang up on anyone that cold calls.

This stuff doesn’t scale, and both the small and large issues should be called out. If you think something might be spam, it almost certainly is and spammers don’t deserve to be treated nicely.

Seth has also said that “the people you most want to engage with don’t want to be hustled“, and that’s a perfect way to put it. There are great ways to market to your desired audience, but don’t hustle them — engage with them.

We think that’s stupid

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Recently the “Art of Investing” podcast had the guys from the “Acquired” podcast on their show to discuss how Acquired has grown to be what it is (roughly 300,000 downloads per episode).

There were a lot of great moments in the show, but one that stood out was when Ben and David were talking about the early days of Acquired and how they knew they wanted to work together:

“I really am just vibing with this person because we’re speaking the language. We both feel like even though others in our industry act this way and say these things, we think that’s stupid.”

Over the years, they’ve been pressured to do things “like everyone else” such as publishing more often, or covering different types of companies. They’ve chosen to stay the path because they think some of those things are “stupid”.

Similar to Ali and my start at GreenMellen, these guys found themselves together and were fortunate to already be on the same page about a lot of things. We find things like putting our brand on client websites and forcing long-term contracts to be stupid. Specifically, to steal from Ben and David again, “we both feel like even though others in our industry act this way and say these things, we think that’s stupid.“

Podcasts can publish at different intervals and cover different industries, and none are necessarily wrong. However, finding what works for you and not just blindly following everyone else can leave you in a very powerful position.

I encourage you to listen to that full episode from them to learn more.

The virtuous cycle of enlightened hospitality

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Danny Meyer (who I mentioned a few days ago) has a philosophy about who everyone at his restaurants should be focused on. He calls this this the “virtuous cycle of enlightened hospitality”, and it goes in this very specific order.

  1. Team
  2. Customer
  3. Community
  4. Suppliers
  5. Investors

As he shares during a podcast with Adam Grant, this isn’t intended to leave the investors out to dry. In fact, it’s the opposite; by focusing on the team first and going from there, the business is likely to be more successful and provide even better returns for the investors.

You can really look at this list from the bottom up. The investors are happy because of the items above them, all of which trickle down from the team.

It’s easy to say “the customer comes first”, but if the customer comes before your team you’ll struggle with retention and create a worse situation for everyone involved — especially the customer. The idea that “the customer is always right” is short-sighted and has likely led to a lot of great employees leaving companies over the years.

If you want your customers to be treated well, start by putting your team first and everything else will fall into place.