The Select Few

November 12th, 2020

Today I was pitched by two AI lead-generation services and one SEO content marketing writing firm.

They all promised me great ways to reel in mass “targeted” leads.

One of them showed me how I could scrape search results from LinkedIn and copy and paste those contacts into a mass mailing system in one fowl swoop.

In the industrial era of radio and TV and mass-broadcasted spam, this would’ve been amazing! What an efficient way to interrupt and distract scores of “leads”.

Fortunately, we’re not living in the industry era anymore. Now the rules have changed, those contacts have an “off” button for unwanted distractions. Ad-blockers and spam filters are commonplace.

But the real, uncomfortable question is: would they want to hear from me?

Do these unsuspecting, mass-collected “qualified contacts” want yet another templated message in their inbox? Would they really benefit from yet another machine optimized blog post of banal and unimaginative “content”?

What if, instead, we focused on the select few?

Just enough people who cared.
Just the right people who need our work.
Just the ones we could help.

By the way, “targeted” is a hunting term.