From Seth Godin’s “Spam 3.0” blog:
The rise of AI has many implications to all of us. For those, like myself and I hope you, that love doing business directly with other humans via referrals AI presents an amazing opportunity.
That’s right! I am bullish on AI when it comes to my business and yours.
Ironically, it is the growth of AI (been happening for quite some time) and its effect on how marketing reaches customers through automation (spam) and persistence (never ending prospecting that is soulless) that is encouraging me and my clients and should be encouraging you to.
Here is the quote from Seth’s amazing daily blog:
Any fully open system of digital communication will corrode over time. Bad messages will crowd out the good ones.
The new normal: Someone finds a database of every residential property, then another of cell phones. An AI is trained to call every homeowner, every day, asking if they’re thinking of selling their home. Millions of calls an hour. The leads (one out of 40,000 calls, perhaps) are sold to real estate brokers.
Multiply this by 500 different hustlers in a dozen industries, and now the open nature of the phone is gone forever.
And then texts.
And of course, email. An inbox with 100,000 unread messages in it is no longer a functional tool.
Open systems come with the requirement of self-restraint and humanity. When we replace those with automated stealers of attention with a profit margin, the system can no longer remain open.
Permission and trust keep going up in value, precisely as quickly as selfish forces work to succeed without them.
Read that last sentence again: “Permission and trust keep going up in value”
Hallelujah!
All financial services professionals that have done (or are at least committed to starting) the hard work of making it in this tough business and maintaining relationships with their clients and other professionals should be rejoicing. Here are several reasons why:
- The time you have spent on building relationships is an ascending asset! Most of you are looking for prospective clients with significant earnings and wealth. These prospects are already hard to get meetings with in general and as the continued corruption of communications systems and social media continues…referrals are going to become one of the few guaranteed ways to identify and then get introductions to ideal clients.
- You are ahead of the competition if they have been focusing on digital solutions for their marketing growth. Don’t get it twisted, I do digital marketing as well BUT it is integrated within my referral system as a component of it…not the reverse. I have seen this type of shift a couple of times in my long career (one of the few benefits of being over 55) and everytime the ‘herd’ went all in on new technology, the referral people just kept growing and serving their network and ended up doing not only well, but thriving when the new tech got stale and corrupt.
- You already ‘own’ your marketing (your network and clients). There are no additional costs (time and money) for you to keep growing and scaling your business by referral. The costs, in fact, are the foundation for exponential growth (spending time with clients and centers of influence) and you are already used to spending that time and it is a foundation in your calendar of actions and events that you love doing.
What do you do if you have been seduced by the siren song of new tech and AI?
First of all, ask if you really enjoy getting referrals and if you are willing to give them as well. Referrals, unlike AI and other digital marketing, require you to also spend time working on helping others. This is a real downer to the more predatory professionals out there and is why I always say that being ‘by referral’ isn’t for everyone.
Secondly, spend more time with your current clients in person (you know that offline stuff). Pick your favorite clients and take them out to coffee/wine/scotch/kombucha…whatever you two like to do is what works. Make sure you are getting to know them better and specifically find out what areas of their life they are challenged in and are looking to grow. Then help them.
I use AI everyday and you might too. However, I use it primarily for research and creating things. The rest of my time is spent talking to real people in the real world. You should try it.
