About 15 years ago I had dinner with one of my more accomplished clients, a successful entrepreneur even before she started her marketing agency.

She had developed some software for internal use and she was spinning it off into a stand-alone SaaS business. (She’s since built and sold both businesses and now she’s an investor.)

She was asking questions about my business. I don’t remember the questions or the answers but I do remember her locking onto my eyes and saying in a voice shaped to ensure I would remember her words, “Blair, figure out what the problem is. Solve it. Automate it.”

I’m sure she would give me a failing grade on taking that advice, but I write of it today because the AI-driven tools are demanding that we all automate, and quickly.

I see lots of great examples of people automating business processes and client solutions.

And I see just as many examples of people automating the wrong things.

For example, have a look at the volume of spam in your inbox.

Note that it all follows the same patterns that I wrote about in this LinkedIn post. I won’t repeat the tactics here but you know what they are. (David C. Baker and I just recorded a 2Bobs podcast episode spoofing these tactics and the charlatans that peddle them. SpamHackTM Your Way to Growth should be dropping into your podcast feed on August 13th.)

The SpamHackersTM have taken the thing they didn’t like doing, were never going to do—properly—on their own, and they automated it. To compensate for the garbage-quality faux intimacy that this approach leans on, they’ve increased their volume, using a few hacks that—for now —allow them to “spam their TAM” without penalty.

I know that as a reader of these posts you would never do any of this. Like me, you see the sale as the sample of the engagement to follow. You understand that if you want to lead like the expert in the engagement then you must lead like the expert in the sale and never sacrifice the high ground of the expert for anything.

But the truth is I’ve received such spam, using techniques like burner email domains, from firms that have been through Win Without Pitching training—firms for which we are not even in their target market. [sigh]

This is the wrong application of these tools. These are the same people who saw the promise of the internet then did the only logical thing—got into the pornography business.

I personally think we will look back on this unique point in history and we will see that much of the mundane work that many of our people did could and should have been automated many years prior. (I was warned 15 years ago.) We will understand that we had an opportunity to free our people from rote work and refocus them on problems and projects that created real value for our clients and ourselves and more meaningful and interesting careers for them.

Instead, we chose to spam the internet.

The power of real outreach is on the rise. Genuinely targeted, researched and personalized messages coming from a true expert business can cut through and can be done without sacrificing the high ground of the expert. As soon as you automate it, you’re a spammer.

There are dozens of things you should be automating in your business. This isn’t one of them.

Marketing, whether it’s inbound through content creation or outbound through unsolicited inquiries, works when it is a practice. A habit. A ritual, even. You do it day in and day out, losing yourself in the process, ignoring the temptation to get rich quick. 

You think you are building a business when really you are building yourself. When you have succeeded, the business follows.

There are no short cuts.

-Blair