Ten sales & marketing tactics that are allegedly dead…

Apparently, if you want to sell a new idea or trend or product, you tell your prospects that the alternative option is dead.

Personally, I’m losing track of how many sales & marketing strategies & tactics are dead (supposedly).  Here are a handful I hear about most often.

SEO Is Dead

What I think they mean is that engineering and forcing top-ranking articles is dead.  Sure, Google, has made it harder to jerry-gig placement for certain keywords.  With every animal-themed algorithm change, they’re making it harder to “game” and more important to simply publish relevant content to your intended audience.  And apparently, that means SEO is dead.

Blogging Is Dead

Because it doesn’t work automatically and immediately, it’s dead.  Because you have to write like a human being (and not like a keyword-stuffing robot), it’s dead.  Because it’s hard, and it takes time, and it’s difficult to templatize – it’s dead.

Prospecting Is Dead

Your prospective customers don’t want to hear from you!  Doesn’t matter if you have something interesting to say, keep it to yourself!  Prospecting doesn’t work, just wait for prospects to call you!  OK…

Cold Calling Is Dead

You can’t call your prospects either.  They don’t have telephones anymore, or don’t answer them, or don’t pay any attention to inbound messages of any kind  If cold calling is dead, that means there aren’t any companies or individuals, anywhere, who are calling their prospects and offering something of value.  That means there aren’t any salespeople calling prospects and turning those conversations into mutually-beneficial value.  OK…

Traditional Advertising Is Dead

Because social media and inbound marketing and content marketing and waiting for your dream clients to call you are all so awesome, that means traditional advertising doesn’t work!  Right?!  Apparently that means anything that a previous generation did or used to market their services to prospects is no longer relevant, or doesn’t work.  Anything they learned doesn’t apply to us now.  OK…

Newspapers Are Dead

This is a slippery slope.  Are newspapers really dead?  Or is the print newspaper dead?  Is the new business dead?  Is it really that black and white?  Someone this weekend told me they still read The Drudge Report.  I had completely forgotten about that site!  It’s not a newspaper but then again, what is it?  Is it a new-media newspaper?  Does that mean it’s dead too?!

Email Is Dead

Nobody uses it.  But everybody uses it.  OK…

Web Advertising Is Dead

Nobody uses or clicks on banner ads.  Yet one of the most efficient forms of Web advertising today is remarketing, which give advertisers access to banner ad placements in front of prospects who have already been on your Web site.  Pennies on the dollar ad rates with high click rates.  But alas, it’s dead.  OK…

The 30-second TV Ad Is Dead

I’ve heard many advertisers lament that TV is dead.  Unfortunately, the reality says that we’re watching more TV than ever, exposed to more advertiser messages than ever.  Placing an ad on one of four TV networks is dead.  Our attention is splintered on television farther than ever before.  It’s more complicated, more difficult to leverage, but does that mean it’s dead?

Inbound Marketing Is Dead

I literally heard this last week from a company evangelizing an account-based marketing (ABM) approach.  So now we’ve come full circle.  The inbound marketing proponents told us that advertising was dead, but now ABM evangelists are saying that inbound marketing is dead.  OK…

Sometimes trends really do die.  But that is a rare occurrence.

I assume most of you reading this are using some, if not the majority, of the strategies and tactics above in your business right now – successfully and profitably.

It’s good to listen, learn, think.  Just don’t paralyze your efforts because someone else – with an agenda – arbitrarily says what you are doing is dead.