I suspect you’re right that the email is a con job. I do suspect that there are some sellers who will get sucked in. These cons exist because we sellers demand they exist as I discuss in this post.

It’s important that young marketers pay attention to your article and try to gain perspective as quickly as possible. Reading history books on business and marketing will help.

At the same time, I think you are being too kind to the “Spammer”. By implying that every product, in every city and state can be sold the same way to any customer, they reveal that they are baiting those looking for a quick fix for poor sales and marketing. I’d be willing to bet that their offer is a con and the people who respond are gullible marks.

That’s putting it in old fashioned terms.

Thanks for the input. It’s funny how each generation must learn that what’s new and revolutionary for them is really just a new twist on something older generations have seen before in some form or fashion. A strong economy that lasts for six, seven, eight years? For the young MBA’s it was new and never ending. For us who had lived through the seventies and eighties, we’d seen it before and knew it would end–we just didn’t know exactly how it’d end. The instant connections worldwide afforded us by social media? Although we older folks hadn’t had anything like Facebook, Twitter, or blogs in the past, we had seen enough technology to know it was useful but not revolutionary in the way we sell.

Thirty or forty years from now when you and I are long gone and these younger folks are our age, they’ll be watching the next technological wonder come along and hear from the younger generation how it will completely change the way business is done. I’m willing to bet they’ll be wrong. We may see wonders in terms of technology change in the next 30 to 40 years but we won’t see any change in human nature. And no matter what changes are in store for us in terms of things, we still have to sell to humans the way humans are, not the way we wish they were.

We must be of the same generation. I believe you are dead on. You are only going back a few years with your references to the telephone. We can look back throughout all of history and see where technology, while changing and bettering our world, didn’t, can’t, and won’t replace live, face-to-face human interaction. I still remember that great United Airlines commercial from many years ago where the boss tells his troops they lost a customer. He passes out United tickets to everyone in the room. When asked what he’ll be doing, he pulls out his ticket and says going to go visit an old customer.