I get a lot of spam in my inbox every day, and I’m sure you do too. Most of it is just blatant spam, but there is still a subset of it that thinks that it’s just “cold marketing” — which I still categorize as spam.
I think a lot of that comes from folks like the ones that I shared last year that were unhappy with how people were reacting to their spam.
I talk about trust quite a bit on here, and the idea of being “a trusted partner” is something we strive for with all of our clients. However, becoming a trusted partner takes time and effort and mutual respect for one another.
That’s why I thought this email I got a few days ago was pretty funny:
I think they considered it “cold” rather than “spam”, because they clearly looked me up and targeted me directly (hence the simultaneous connection request on LinkedIn), but it’s spam nonetheless.
Really, it got me thinking more about what it means to be a trusted partner. At the end of the day, it means doing everything you possibly can to help the other party. This doesn’t necessarily mean going beyond the scope of your contract, as that can hurt your company (and hurt your client as a result), but just doing the right thing. This is doing the right big things (meeting deadlines, producing great work) as well as small thing (not sticking your link in their footer).
It seems unlikely that a relationship like that would start from an amoral piece of spam. If you want to be a trusted partner, you need to be willing to put in the work, and that includes starting the relationship from a place of honesty.
