The Inbox Communication

Every week, my LinkedIn inbox gets flooded with dozens of cold messages. Most of the time, I’m Ana, but sometimes I’m Danielle, Sophia, or Aqsa (because how could one make their coldest possible opening if not with a wrong name).

Ninety nine percent of the messages have nothing to do with what I do. It’s just a bunch of keywords someone dropped in LinkedIn Sales Navigator and hoped for the best. 

It’s like throwing spoons at a dartboard. You’re losing time and the game.

Researching your prospects takes time. So does tailoring a proper business message. You need to understand your cold leads before sending a formal ‘Your Marketing Highness’ or a casual ‘Wassup dog’ touch base. 

Call it God’s great sense of humor or Murphy’s law, the “Wassup dog” intro usually ends up in Ingrid’s inbox, a Gen X who tries to get closer to gen Z but hates millennials and every inch of their professional existence.

Wassup dog is not even the scariest wording one can get or send. It’s the message that leaves one confused, rereading the paragraph and wondering why it is in their inbox.

In Art & Copy, George Lois said: “I was always trying to sell a product, but I was always making a point.”

I want to see this. When I open a message, I want to recognize boldness, rebelliousness, someone making a sales revolution. Not showcasing their ego, their product’s specifics and unique selling point. Show me there is something in your product that you know exists—an unarticulated truth that perhaps even you can’t fully define—that’s your unique selling point. It’s not what you want it to be, and it’s not what your family and friends told you it is when they accepted the grandiose title of beta testers. 

Messaging has taken a form of begging: there is little to no direct contact, a terrible approach to reverse psychology and it usually ends up in rejection. 

People have become either lazy or too comfortable in what they offer yet they still expect a miraculous response that will lead to a million dollar deal.

Communication doesn’t happen just naturally. You have to make room for it to happen. Listen, but listen closely and carefully. Then write, rewrite and refine, until there’s no need to ask chatGPT if what you wrote makes sense. If your message doesn’t make sense to you at a gut level, it’s just a random arrangement of symbols.

Resistance to Communication

Only one thing scares me more than bad communication—no communication at all. 

Over the years, I’ve interacted with hundreds of clients and thousands of their clients, both in-house and in agency. I’ve met fantastic minds: big thinkers, dreamers, black sheep, and brave ones who often end up suffocated by the scared, conformist majority. 

I’ve also met egocentrics who were convinced they were eccentrics who belonged to the herd of dreamers. While the dreamers discuss ideas, the egocentrics make noise thinking it counts as conversation. The moment they’re exposed to two-way communication, they find a way to label it as a waste of time. 

In the past seven years, I’ve worked closely with ego-driven business leaders. These were the top decision-makers, wearing their authority like a brooch on their white collars. They led mostly small teams of talented, hard-working professionals. Despite their big potential and long-term clients, their communication—both with their teams and around their products—was nonexistent, or at best, inadequate.

As their marketing and communication strategist, I argued that we were destined to sink if we didn’t refine our messaging, and so it happened. 

Not one of them proved me wrong, because they were too busy convincing me they were right.

Of the many things I learned working with unforthcoming people, one thing stuck with me: Knowing when to say nothing is an intelligent choice. So is speaking up. 

I would rather close the door after a well-composed argument rather than drown in a fear-induced silence and wait for a landslide to hit my back.

If you can’t say it, don’t do it

I like to stick to one simple rule: If you don’t have the guts to share your arguments out loud, do not make a decision. 

Unfortunately, this is all too rare. Small and medium-sized businesses are too tight on a budget and people-wise so they can’t risk spending money on communicating a product or being honest within their teams. Corporations are too occupied, too overwhelmed, too angry, too invested in chasing numbers. The best they can do is “postpone this matter for next month, it’s not that urgent.” It’s never urgent—until it turns into a crisis but everyone thinks it’s a Dwight-like fire drill.  

Marketing and sales are on the edge of losing their sparkle and industry identity.

It used to be fun, dynamic (and no, Manager, I don’t mean perpetually stressful), intelligent, even bone-breaking and painful—but worth every effort. Now it’s mostly déclassé, sloppy, lazy, cheap yet expensive in all the wrong ways.

We can pretend it’s not that bad, and that it’s no one’s fault but the pandemic, the post-pandemic inflation and the war-caused global crisis. Or we can calm down, look at ourselves before pointing fingers and ask ourselves: Who killed marketing (communication)?

Was it Dave from HR or the CEO’s brother? Was it Ingrid, Igor or “that annoying colleague” from the sales department? Was it the left or the right wing?

What if all of these started the decadence of marketing and communication? What if we’ve all contributed, bit by bit, through our own timidity, complacency, silent approval of mediocrity, and reluctance to push for change?

Documentary Recommendation: Art & Copy – Doug Pray