I’ve been thinking about my email lately. And I have the feeling that my inbox has been harassed. It’s being harassed by the global sales effort. Sales people all around the world, trying to capture my attention to get their precious sales through.

What is annoying, is the observable pattern of how this is done. The algorithms are there, to locate me as a potential target audience, based on my LinkedIn profile, the profile of the company I work for, my social presence. I am segmented into a potential sales bucket, my email is sold, and then the attack begins.

It’s a flood… as if I suddenly become the center of the entire global market.

And this is cheap. A list of contacts, a classification algorithm, a curated message and BANG… commence the attack and let’s see what happens. The effort of the sales industry to send an automated email sequence to ten, hundreds or thousands of prospects, is exactly the same. It costs pennies.

I am always wary about three types of sales emails: 

#1: The first type has a link to book a demo, schedule a call or similar variants.

#2: The second is the email with the unsubscribe or opt-out link.

#3: The third email is the persistent email, the one with the numerous follow-ups, when I’ve made the conscious choice to ignore you.

#1: You are a fisherman. You throw your nets in the sea, and you wait to catch some fish. You treat me like a fish and I know it.

#2: I never remember to opt-in to your emails. So, spamming me without my consent, is actually… illegal. You violate my rights and I know it.

#3: I read your email and I am not interested. But you keep pushing. You harass my time and I know it.

It is super annoying to see the exact same pattern, landing into my inbox again and again. Dear sales, you are not alone. You are competing thousands of companies, battling for my attention, with the same arsenal in your hands.

I am not going to respond to your email. Unless you hit a nerve, you find me in the weak spot of looking for a solution right now, I have a blocker to overcome.

You can do it, but it is the hard path and it takes time. But you usually prefer taking shortcuts… oh well…

—

Nikos Vasileiou