Do you have Rainbow flatware? Biomagnetic ear stickers? A diamond-shaped ice cube tray? Baby feather wings? Believe it or not, these things actually exist. You don’t believe it?
Have you signed up to use a company that uses AI to generate leads for you? You haven’t? Me neither.
It seems to me that the only companies using AI to generate leads are the companies trying to sell you their AI-based services to generate new opportunities for you. How ironic!
AI-generated emails make up the majority of the digital solicitations I that clutter up my inbox and they are all from companies offering lead generation and appointment booking services. These emails are very easy to recognize. The personalization is nearly non-existent, the formatting is awful, the message sucks, and they lack traditional signature panels. But the easiest way to recognize that these are AI-generated emails is the workflow. They never send one email. There are usually five or six more that follow and they all seem to include some of the same requests to “bump” their email to the top of the inbox, to “take another look” at their offer, “acknowledge” how busy I am, and the one that drives me crazy, that they “hope” I’m doing well.
In addition to AI, some marketers and sellers utilize workflows from their Marketo, Hubspot and similar marketing/prospecting applications. Emails and workflows from these applications are usually better composed and formatted. I’m looking at one of those now, from a UK-based technology firm, attempting to sell outsourced IT consulting. I have been contacted 9 times via email in the last 5 weeks from this particular workflow. They all begin with “Hope you’re doing well.” Then they follow with:
- 1st email: I am getting in touch to make sure your fieldwork and data collection needs are met.
- 2nd email: This is a quick note to make sure you received my previous email
- 3rd email: In case my previous email was an educated stab in the dark,
- 4th email: I am connecting with you to ask if you need additional support
- 5th email: I hope you had a chance to review my previous email and hope it didn’t get buried in your inbox.
- 6th email: I am sorry if I caught you at the wrong time with my previous email.
- 7th email: see 1st email (back to the beginning)
- 8th email: I am getting in touch today to see if there is a chance for us to collaborate on your current/upcoming projects.
- 9th email: I was just curious to know if you received my previous email, and if you had all the information you need in order to get going!
She incorrectly assumed that after 9 emails, she has developed a relationship, participated in positive, constructive conversations with me, and that I have moved from cold prospect to closable prospect. All this despite hearing nothing but crickets from me. This is insane! Why are people wasting their time on these “please delete me” emails?
Back to the AI-generated emails. They are exponentially worse than what I just shared above!
There is a lot of noise. Try getting a Blog post, tweet or LinkedIn post noticed. Even with a large following, they don’t all get the traction one would expect. Emails are no different because everyone is emailing. Let’s put emails into 6 categories:
- Clients and prospects – important and urgent
- Newsletters – not important, not urgent
- Internal – importance and urgency unknown
- Spam and Junk – not important, not urgent, no need to read
- Existing Vendors – importance and urgency unknown
- Friends and Family – importance and urgency unknown
That leaves email solicitations. Which of the six categories would you put cold, awful, impersonal, uncompelling workflow emails powered by AI?
That’s right, your unsolicited cold email will go into the spam or junk folder and if it doesn’t start in one of those two folders, it will certainly end up there!
Instead, try the phone. There’s no noise and no competition. If that’s not to your liking, try using video conferencing.