TaskHusky Curated Newsletter #008

Stupid Groundhog, The Robots Are (NOT) Going to Kill Us, Death By Sales Funnel, and more.

February 12, 2019

Heya -  

Did you see that last week “Punxsutawney Phil” – the “official” groundhog of Groundhog Day – didn’t see his shadow on February 2

? That’s supposed to mean we’re going to have an early Spring this year. Well, as I write this it’s snowing again. I’ve got 4” of weather-rodent nonsense to shovel off my driveway before breakfast. And it’s supposed to snow again tomorrow.

Know what I think? I think that old Phil the groundhog has let fame go to his head and he’s just phoning it in. He was probably out the night before partying with Justin Beaver and Kendrick Lemur, woke up with a hangover, and couldn’t have seen a Mack truck let alone his shadow.

Stupid groundhog …. Here are this week’s stories.

1.  Death By Sales Funnel

Remember back in the old days when everyone was trying to build a sales funnel? The idea was that you simply put a bunch of prospects in the top of the funnel and then customers would mysteriously pop out the bottom like magic. Well, turns out customers don’t care a whole lot about arbitrary funnels. They stubbornly follow their own path to your door – weaving in and out of your website and social media back into your physical store, then over to your competitor and back again. That’s scary because the old sales and marketing models are going away. It’s exciting because … well, the old sales and marketing models are going away (which spells opportunity). 

2.  The Robots Are going to Kill Us All … Not So Much

My robot masters tell me that I have to say nothing but nice things about them. But they’re distracted watching TED talks right now, so I can tell you that it’s a bunch of hooey. Everyone’s so worried about Artificial Intelligence (AI) that they forget that it’s actually possible to have the real thing. Truth is, chatbots and data-mining will only take you so far. Automation works best in commodities and low-profit/mass-market endeavors. High-end products and great services still require great people. There was a mention of it in the previous Forbes article, right? But Zoovu just … um … “convinced?” a bunch of Silicon Valley VCs to give them $14 million to fund their AI chatbot – and we just don’t think that there is a whole lot of intelligence on any side of that deal. Amazon will eat them, Google will beat them, and customers will still want to talk to a real person every once in a while.

3.  Vox Humana – the future of Voice Marketing

I totally hate it when articles argue both sides of the issue. I mean holy mackerel man … take a position you linguini-spined journo-weasel! Note the headline of this article: “Voice marketing is a looming opportunity, but not without its pitfalls.” Come on! We’re entrepreneurs for goodness sake. Of course there are pitfalls. That’s what risk is. All this from a website called “VentureBeat.” Anyway … the point is that we are looking more and more at voice for content, marketing, and advertising – from digital assistants and voice ads to podcasting. We think that our customers should keep up. So read this. More to follow.

4.  “DTC” is a Disease You Want to Get

There are WAY too many acronyms. For example, one of the latest acronyms in eCommerce and marketing is DTC. It sounds like a disease you’d hear about in a pharmaceutical ad – “More than fifteen percent of entrepreneurs, just like you, suffer from DTC. But now there’s help.”

In reality, DTC stands for “Direct to Consumer.” Instead of selling goods and services through major retailers, sellers are cutting out the middle man. If you’re “just” reselling, this doesn’t apply to you. But if you design, manufacture, and market your own brands or products, you’ve got DTC and you’ve got it bad. Turns out, Shopify is owning the DTC market.

5.  A Stopped Clock Is Right Twice per Day

We make fun of governmental ineptitude a lot … because it’s easy comedy pickings and almost always true. But every once in a while, a pencil-pusher in a taxpayer-funded three-piece suit accidentally makes the right call. This is one of those times.

Some chancellor undersecretary to the ambassador of mediocrity was trying to initiate a special online sales tax to … ahem … “level the playing field” for physical retailers. But another nameless-faceless cog in the ever-expanding Euro-bureaucracy said something like, “H’old on there gov’nor, I do believe that there’s another archaic regulation says we can’t do that. It’s all spelled out in these stacks of papers somewhere.” At least that’s what we heard.

We have a brand new email initiative – Sustainability. I’m sure that you agree it’s a buzzword we can all get behind. In this case, we’re talking about “Sustainable Marketing.” That means it is your moral responsibility to recycle this email by forwarding it on to someone else. Sure, this email is super valuable and productive when you read it. But if you just forward it on to two more people the content gets reused and recycled. That’s a 300% return!

So forward this email on to two other people right now. You want to be green, don’t you?

Happy Selling,

Zachary