Market like a sales person? Who knew?

Marketo’s B2B marketing blog, I really should drop in more often.

Anyway, while browsing yesterday, I read Maria Pergolino’s roundup article on the Marketing Profs recent Digital Marketing World conference, which made me kinda-sorta wish I’d attended.

I’m not going to do a roundup of Maria’s intriguing roundup, but one of the take-aways that made her list was this bit:

Market like a sales person
Marketers want to look like sales reps.  No, I don’t mean they want to golf and jet from city-to-city dining with prospects.  Instead, they want their emails to look like they came from sales reps to encourage email opens- and do so with personalization and segmentation plus tricks like adding “Sent from my Blackberry” or adding misspellings to their emails.  I haven’t tried these ‘tricks’, and saw a some people on Twitter disagree, but others said this was keeping recipients from hitting the delete button and encouraging them to click through on their email messages.

Now, while it may not be a bad idea to try to think like sales person on occasion, based on the great store of experience I have with sales folks, I’m not sure I’d want to market like one, even taking into consideration Maria’s noting that she doesn’t mean we have to play golf. (Thanks the gods for that one.)

Personally, I’ve seen plenty of those spello-d e-mails and snail-mails, which the sales guys generally had me look at after they’d already sent them off. And I have to think that, if I’m on the receiving end, and get something riddled with mistakes, I am not going to be thinking, hey, this guy is really authentic, this isn’t just some dreck from marketing. I’m going to be thinking, hey, this guy is completely careless; if he can’t spell the name of his product correctly, how am I going to trust anything he tells me?

Perhaps the world has changed so utterly that typos are now considered charming and real, rather than cringeworthy, as the typos, spellos, and grammos that have happened on my watch (and there have been a few) have all been for me. (Blogging is exempt, of course.)

What does a misspelling convey that’s positive? To me, it screams I’m in a hurry and you’re not all that important.

I don’t know where I am on “Sent from my Blackberry”, other than to speculate that, unless a sales person is responding to some query of mine, I’d find this pretty annoying after I clicked through on the first one or two and saw that it didn’t deliver something that was plenty interesting.

(And I’m thinking of a great blog topic keying off this post. How about “Sell like a marketing person”?)

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