The Absence of Intelligence in AI New Business Targeting

read

by rob

If you’ve read many of my previous blogs, you may be aware of my belief that cold B2B new business targeting takes a fair amount of time and effort. Particularly if the service you’re selling will cost the buyer tens of thousands of pounds every year, albeit that should generate a far higher ROI.

However, more and more over the last year or two I’ve been suffering from sleepless nights at the thought of a genius robot stealing my job, along with all of our clients, as we hurtle along into the age of Artificial Intelligence at breakneck speed.

At the same time, I also receive an alarming number of emails where the sender may have subscribed to the belief that if you give an infinite number of chimps an infinite number of typewriters, you will eventually have one that churns out the complete works of Shakespeare.

Here’s the latest one:

Hi Rob,

Congratulations on your remarkable career at Alchemis! Your dedication to new business development and winning clients for agencies like yours is truly impressive.

I recently came across some fascinating news about Alchemis. It seems that Grown Alchemist’s facial serum has been earning rave reviews, helping to address visible signs of aging and improve skin health.

At NAME REDACTED TO SPARE YOUR BLUSHES, we specialize in AI-driven sales engagement software that can enhance your outreach and business growth strategies. Our platform offers a scalable, multi-channel engagement solution powered by real data and automation. With a database of 700 million contacts and a team of experts ready to assist you, we can help you customize campaigns and automate outreach to interested parties.

I would love to chat with you about an exclusive strategy session that will take no more than 20-30 minutes of your time. We already have hundreds of companies joining these sessions, and we’d be thrilled to have you on board. Let’s start the conversation at Alchemis concierge chat.

Wishing you a fantastic week ahead!

Naturally, a personalised email written as enthusiastically as that deserves some sort of acknowledgement? So I’m thinking something along the lines of:

Hi Mr Robot

Thanks for the email, but I’m gonna have to pick you up on a few points here:

Firstly, I’m over the moon that you have recognised my remarkable career at Alchemis. All too often this is overlooked by the young whippersnappers who have worked with me for less than a decade. They don’t fully appreciate the blood, sweat and tears involved as I toiled for years on end, so it is nice to be validated by you. However, your second sentence doesn’t really make any sense. It appears that you’ve scraped a line from our website and then used it back at me in the wrong context.

But let’s put that aside and focus on the fascinating news you speak of. It is truly amazing indeed as I didn’t know we had branched out into facial serum alongside helping our clients in the marketing agency world win new business. I’ve worked here for over twenty years, so you would think I’d have been kept in the loop about this new diversification, but I guess not! Come to think of it I didn’t know that we’d added a “t” to the end of our company name either, but that seems to have happened midway through your email, so you guys are definitely on the pulse with these exciting updates to our identity and business offering!

It’s good to hear your AI-driven sales engagement software can enhance our business growth – except for the fact that the business you seem to think we are in is about as far removed from the one we are actually in as it is possible to be.

Anyway, I’m pleased that you could help us automate outreach to interested parties… it’s just that I can’t help wondering if it might be fairer to say you could help throw shit at a wall in the hope that some of it might stick? As long as you have an unfathomable amount of shit and a big enough wall.

So, much as you’d love to chat about an exclusive strategy session, sadly I think you lost any chance of that in the first paragraph of your email. Although it’s good to see we’ve changed our name back to Alchemis again by the last!

Wishing you a fantastic week ahead too Mr Robot – and thank you for alleviating some of my fears about you stealing my job.

For tonight at least, I will sleep soundly.

If you would like to find out about how Alchemis can help your agency win new business with a more human approach, please get in touch!