The greatest challenge in marketing
Every problem I’ve aimed to solve in my marketing career has revolved around authenticity at scale. By that I mean every B2B marketing problem really comes down to whether you can make the connection seem like it’s coming from one person specifically for another person, but doing so 50, 100, or 1,000 times.
I’ve been working on a lead-generation workflow through LinkedIn content. The idea is that we can publish content on LinkedIn, see who’s engaged with that content, and then reach out to those people to start a closer relationship. At every turn I keep thinking, “Yes, but how can I make it sound like it’s coming from this person who’s interested in talking to that person?”
Arguably this is more sales than marketing, but any content or funnel has the same fundamental asymmetry.
Claude agents can connect different tools and data together. Then they can research the leads or prospects. Then they can draft and send messages to those people. Then they can follow up, schedule meetings, and so on. But at the end of the day, the recipients really want to connect with a person, not a bot. When they perceive they’re being talked to by an automation system, it’s even worse than not having been talked to at all. They’re being talked at rather than to, perhaps, and a chasm lies between those prepositions.
I receive a dozen emails a day that, after some greeting saying, “I like what you’re doing in Fort Worth with Snapmarket,” indicating they actually know who I am, then say something like, “Have you considered doing a podcast?” Yes, we do that for a living. “I noticed you have someone doing cold outbound.” We don’t. “What if I could guarantee you 500 or 1,000 more leads every month?” I’d drown.
These are immediate nos from me, dawg. But workflows like these are increasing in B2B thanks to advances in AI and automation tools. And perhaps they “work.” A lot of marketing-to-sales hand-offs are just catalyzing a numbers game.
Yet something in me keeps drawing back to being much more thoughtful and personal and, dare I say, intimate. But how do you do that 100 times, maybe 100 times a week? Ain’t no leader got time to sit down to research, write, and follow up with 100 people. We barely have enough time to write one post, let alone 100. Yet that’s what we all want, right? A thoughtful message written just for me? That’s good marketing, so I carry on trying to build systems that do that well.
