The Organ Grinder’s Monkey

“Don’t be a dick” is the tagline for Wil Wheaton’s blog, which I read fanatically (that is, I am a rabid fan of Wil’s and pay attention to his stuff accordingly). I love the simplicity of that statement. It’s clear, it’s concise and it’s straightforward.

And most of us agree - we don’t want to be dicks and we don’t like dealing with dicks. We get it. And in our day-to-day lives, most of us manage to follow this advice most of the time. Until, that is, we step through our office doors.

Then, for whatever reason, we tend to turn into dicks whether we realize it or not. We send out sales pitches to our customers that under the pretense of touching base from one friend to another. We try to figure out how we can squeeze an extra buck or two out of a sales interaction without pausing to think whether or not we’re actually giving value for that extra money. We blatantly pimp affiliate products not because we believe in them or because we think they work, but because we went shopping on an affiliate source site for stuff in our niche with the highest payout per sale. We offer tele-seminars that are 95% pitch and 5% not-quite-useful information. And so on.

Why do we do this? Because we believe that that’s what works. We’ve been told by marketing and business specialists that every conversation with a customer or prospect has to include a “call to action,” that we must use upsells and cross-sales at every sales point, and that we should couch our sales pitches in the form of friendly emails (and that sounds like good advice - it’s telling us not to be sales drones when we contact people - until we stop to think of it from the other end, which is that maybe a real email from a real friend wouldn’t include any pitch at all). We’ve read business books that teach us how to maximize our profits and minimize our effort. We’ve listened to seminars, enlisted in programs and so on that fill our minds with high-powered business boosting techniques and strategies.

And for the most part, this is good info. But when we get out into the real world, we do it wrong.

We forget that this raw information has to be adapted to our situation. We forget that our clients are people, just like us, and not merely ambulatory wallets upon which to exercise our new-found skills. And we keep score by tallying the income we earned, rather than the number of people we helped.

The trigger for this post was an article by Clayton Makepeace called The Triumph of Hope Over Experience. In it, he writes:

Companies that are experiencing declining results in the mail now appear to be eager to repeat those failures online.

They attract new subscribers by offering a “free report” in paid ads and PPC (pay-per-click) efforts. Then, once they’ve captured their prospects’ e-mail addresses, they direct them to a high-hype landing page.

At their very first contact with a new subscriber, these companies prove that they’re not to be trusted.

RESULT: Conversion rates stink.

But what if, instead, they offered a free report and then actually delivered a report and not a pitch?

I agree with Clayton. Conversion matters, but in the end aiming at conversion at the expense of humanity fails on both accounts. Conversion goes into a fatal downward spiral, and takes our humanity (and our view of our customer’s humanity) with it.

My advice is simple: Listen to Wil and don’t be a dick. Everything else follows from that.

Tags: Customers, Ethics and Business //