Congratulations. We’ve Found a New Way to Annoy Our Customers.

STOP SCROLLING.

Did it work? Fantastic. We have your attention. Now what?

We could send an unsolicited video. Maybe a personalized LinkedIn message. Perhaps an AI-generated email that assures the recipient this is definitely not a sales pitch. Or, and this one’s particularly clever, we could send a voicemail disguised as an email. Because apparently, what the world needed was a way to make voicemail less convenient.

The technology is impressive. The creativity is admirable. But there’s a problem. We keep inventing better ways to interrupt people without giving nearly enough thought to why they would want to engage with us.

We’ve Industrialized the Ability to Bother People

Marketing technology has made it remarkably easy to reach thousands of prospects with messages that appear personal, even when we’ve never spoken to a single one of them. AI has accelerated that process considerably. And when engagement falls short, instead of questioning whether we’ve given anyone a reason to respond, we often decide the solution is to reach more people.

Excellent. We’ve industrialized the ability to bother people.

We’re not immune to the temptation. We’ve certainly considered some of these approaches ourselves because they seemed clever or efficient. It’s easy to get caught up in what technology makes possible without questioning whether the person on the receiving end will appreciate it. The tools themselves aren’t the problem. A thoughtful email can open a door, and AI can help us better understand our customers. But an unwanted message doesn’t become welcome simply because we’ve found a more creative way to deliver it.

Attention Is Not Engagement

Creative interruptions can work, at least initially. An unusual subject line might get our email opened, and a personalized video might earn a click. Our dashboards record those interactions as encouraging signs, but they don’t necessarily tell us whether anyone was genuinely interested in what we had to say.

After all, a prospect replying “please remove me from this list” is technically a response. Congratulations on the engagement metric.

We’ve become remarkably good at measuring whether someone noticed us, while the more meaningful question is whether we’ve given them a reason to participate. Attention can create an opportunity for engagement, but it can’t substitute for it. When we confuse the two, we risk celebrating activity that looks successful in a report without accomplishing much for our customers.

Creativity Is Being Applied to the Wrong Problem

Consider two teams approaching the same prospective customer. One focuses on getting its email opened, while the other spends that time understanding what would make a conversation genuinely worthwhile. Both might ultimately send an email, but the thinking behind it changes the interaction before either team hits send.

Here’s what that difference looks like in practice. The first message asks:

“Would you be available for a 30-minute introductory call next week to discuss your needs and explore potential synergies?”

The second offers something more concrete:

“Dan Davis at Triton came to us with a similar challenge: new products, reducing production downtime while meeting tight budgets and firm deadlines. After implementing three practical solutions together, he now reports a 13% reduction in downtime.”

The difference isn’t clever wording. The first message asks for time without establishing why the conversation would be worthwhile. The second brings a comparable business challenge and a measurable result to the table. Instead of asking the prospect to take our word for what we might accomplish, we’re showing them why a conversation could be relevant to their business.

That’s where the work should happen, before the outreach. If we haven’t established a credible connection between what matters to the prospect and what we’re bringing to the conversation, a more creative delivery method won’t solve the problem.

AI can make either approach more efficient. We can use it to better understand an audience and uncover relevant opportunities, or we can use it to send thousands of supposedly personal messages that say essentially the same thing. The email referencing our latest LinkedIn post loses its charm pretty quickly when the rest reveals that the sender has nothing particularly relevant to say.

Novelty might earn the first look, but it rarely earns the second.

Give People a Reason to Engage

Proactive selling matters. Our customers may not know we exist, and sometimes initiating contact is the only way to open a conversation. But if we’re going to interrupt someone’s day, we should have something worth contributing before asking for their time.

One of our partners, Chris, demonstrated this with a Sales Cockpit tool. Rather than describing what the tool could do and asking for a meeting to explain it, he put it directly into a prospect’s hands, built around their real-world business. He gave them the opportunity to experience its usefulness before asking them to invest in a conversation.

That example gets at an important distinction. Providing value doesn’t automatically create engagement. We can share a genuinely useful article that someone reads, appreciates, and promptly forgets. What Chris did was different. He gave the prospect something relevant to explore firsthand, creating a reason to participate rather than simply another reason to listen.

We aim to bring that same thinking to resources like our Sharp Thinking from Influential People content. Sharing useful knowledge is worthwhile, but there’s an opportunity to go further by helping people apply what they’ve learned. The objective isn’t to manufacture a response. It’s to make the interaction worth having, whether or not it immediately leads to a sale.

Ultimately, that’s where our creativity and technology should be doing the heavy lifting. Not in finding more inventive ways to get in front of customers, but in understanding them well enough to create experiences they actually want to engage with.

One Last Interruption

An interruption can get us noticed. Only a reason to engage can make someone want to stay.

So before we invest in the next clever way to reach our customers, let’s ask ourselves one question: If we stopped interrupting them, would we have given them any reason to come to us?

If the answer is no, we don’t need a more creative interruption. We need a better reason to be in the conversation.

And no, there’s not an AI prompt that fixes that.