… And just like that, young McKay here inspired the title for the day’s newsletter.

I will give him one thing. Gaming algorithms can get you Attention. But there’s a lot more to AIDA than A.

You’re still going to need Interest, Desire, and Action.

A desire for attention is not a strategy.

I study the way platforms release features. They typically grant early adopters with unsustainable reach in the beginning. Understanding emerging algorithms is incredibly important for getting that attention.

There’s the sudden launch of the Stories format on all your favorite platforms, and if you’ve paid any attention to that, you’ve likely seen undue prominence placed on the format.

In my personal expierimentation, Twitter’s version of this has led to more DM’s than I’ve ever had on the platform before.

These DM’s have led to more relationship building, and in turn: doors open with more opportunities for wins.

But here’s the most important part.

Algorithms can deliver attention, but algorithms can not build trust OR deliver a good product.

But can they deliver recall? (That alone is a hill that’s often tough to climb.) Being remembered is a good thing, right?

Well, not if the subject can’t make the proper associations with you or your product.

It’s one thing to remember a gimmick or meme, or even who it was that shared it.

Gaining the interest of your future customers is another endeavor indeed.

What Bloom’s taxonomy teaches us is that remembering is not enough.

You have to move into understanding, and there’s a lot more we can do too.

This week , we are going to dig into how to use this educational model in your communication strategy to help go beyond recall and move into understanding and beyond.

Because if folks don’t understand what you are selling, all the attention marketing in the world can’t save the bottom line.

🎶 Musical Note: Thom Bell is known for producing incredible work with many bands, including this Spinners classic; but you may not know that he’s given all that up for another form of creativity now.

I am grateful for each and every one of you that subscribe. Telling a friend is the best way to support this effort.

According to Wikipedia, “the uncanny valley hypothesis predicts that an entity appearing almost human will risk eliciting cold, eerie feelings in viewers.”

Basically that just means that there’s a space between cartoon, and lifelike that just makes us feel creepy.

Christmas ate my house

I am thinking about this today because of the annual acts of my family that have once again surfaced on this cold, December night.

In the spirit of the holiday season, my house has been eaten by Christmas. There are elves on shelves, advent closets, reindeer meals, and endless loops of Bing Crosby.

I’m not totally humbug. I like most of it, actually. But… some of these forced traditions are a b̶r̶i̶d̶g̶e̶ sleigh too far, and tonight was one of these traditions.

Nothing stops this train

Look, The Polar Express is just not a good movie. I’m convinced it is not just the poor acting, bad script, and slow pace of the film that makes it so bad. There is in fact, another reason.

Here’s what Roger Ebert had to say on the subject.

The characters in "The Polar Express" don't look real, but they don't look unreal, either; they have a kind of simplified and underlined reality that makes them visually magnetic.

I’d say that Ebert was faceblind – because these 3D renders give me the creeps. Have you seen the Polar Express? It’s really not ok.

Look. These people just don’t look like people and it shows. But they kind of do look like people a little though, too. That’s a pretty insurmountable problem. Here’s a take on why (also from Wikipedia):

Violation of human norms. The uncanny valley may "be symptomatic of entities that elicit a model of a human other but do not measure up to it".

If an entity looks sufficiently nonhuman, its human characteristics are noticeable, generating empathy. However, if the entity looks almost human, it elicits our model of a human other and its detailed normative expectations. The nonhuman characteristics are noticeable, giving the human viewer a sense of strangeness.

In other words, a robot stuck inside the uncanny valley is no longer judged by the standards of a robot doing a passable job at pretending to be human, but is instead judged by the standards of a human doing a terrible job at acting like a normal person.

I can’t get that last paragraph out of my head.

Not because of the movie characters at this point. There’s always therapy for that. It’s because most corporate brands don’t really look and sound kind of like they represent real people, rather they look and sound like a businessish type entity that’s trapped by consensus.

People are always circling back and bubbling things up. They are hoping we are well, and staying safe. They thank us for the question, and they are there with an answer that doesn’t quite match our question.

So little attention is consciously paid to the human aspect of a brand that it really never crosses most people’s minds. They just expect most companies to not respond, or put them through an endless circle of hoops to get anything done. They don’t expect interaction because it isn’t the norm.

These brands don’t really reach the uncanny valley because they haven’t allowed their communications to be human. That’s ok. You do you, right?

But every now and then…

Every now and then there is the brand that looks like they are acting like a human. It could be that they have adopted a playful tone, use contractions and colloquialisms that are not washed out like a corporation would use. It could be a number of things that give the vibe that there’s actually someone human behind the publish button.

These brands write the “I’m a real person just like you” check…

…but most of these checks bounce when it’s time to cash in.

They don’t reply to your comments or dm’s on social, or worse: they redirect to a different channel like email or a website form (when they are already having a conversation where they are). They just really aren’t there. They are in broadcast mode and you didn’t make the cut to reply to. Heck, you were just looking for some fun engagement, and their vapid narcissism is on display with their lack of response. Did they see the comment, not see it? Who knows?

This can be an absolutely abhorrent quality that will burn the brand affinity your customer’s may have had to begin with. It doesn’t take much to lose people who have been your big fan when something is just off.

In other words, a robot stuck inside the uncanny valley is no longer judged by the standards of a robot doing a passable job at pretending to be human, but is instead judged by the standards of a human doing a terrible job at acting like a normal person.

If you are going for “human brand”, you really need to own it, go all the way with it, and not let it slip over time due to apathy or a transfer of brand voice/social duties to a new team member. This needs to be chiseled in stone, or at least explicitly stated on the company wiki.

This week, we are going to be reflecting on the elements of a brand voice in public comms, and the promises the voice makes that you must avoid breaking (if you can help it).

I’ll see you Tuesday with the Brand Promise Framework that every brand should be able to at least use as a good rubric for how you’re doing. It’s the one that I’ve used before, and I am using for a new project that I’ll be telling you more about in the future.

Why brand voice? Demand and brand go hand in hand.

🎶 Musical Note: Some of the tracks on the Westworld soundtrack are better than Season 3 itself. Three for one this time. Aren’t I a good host?

If you found value in this weeks issue, please let me know! Just reply to this email or leave a comment.

In this issue, we’ll explore why we so often lose on things we really want to do – and what we can do about it.

Reflections

Too often, I’ve had grand plans that never came to fruition. Recently, I took stock of many of these ideas. It turns out that almost all of them were squandered for the exact same reason.

Somewhere along the way, I had caught a snag.

There is a Snag just around every corner. This creature lives for one purpose: to kill momentum.

If we aren’t careful, we tend to catch it. Not because we are looking for it, but because we don’t see it coming.

The unique thing about a Snag is that it isn’t designed to block you from working on your project, or shipping your campaign.

Its only motivation is to SLOW YOU DOWN. In fact, we don’t ever catch the snag in these scenarios. It’s the Snag that catches us.

We’ve all experienced this. Especially when it comes to marketing.

There are so often so many moving parts that almost anything can gum up the works.

It might be that the approval process takes too long.

It might be that the martech software you have to work with is clunky or slow; or maybe it it even prone to error..

It might be that you need a resource or some knowledge that you just don’t have right now.

Whichever the reason… it’s not always easy to affect necessary change overnight.

However, we do have something in our toolkit.

If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

The Snag will not stop. It is coming for you whether you like it or not.

So what can you do? If the Snag is trying to slow you down, it might enjoy a taste of its own medicine.

Set traps to attempt to slow down the Snag.

Huh?

Metaphors abound here. Let’s take a quick…

Reality Break

Over the American Thanksgiving Holiday Break, our family banded together to help my two kids (Harper & Weston) start a business.

But it nearly didn't get off the ground.

Here’s what happened. I went to Shopify to see how quickly we could get up and running.

We were starting with a single product. Reindeer Food.

I thought it would be super quick to get up and running. It kind of wasn't. At least the way I thought we’d do it.

We’d purchased a domain, and had planned to launch with a Shopify store on that domain.

But it turned out that it wasn’t that easy to just toss a product up and get going.

The themes were either:

• Free, but clearly built for big catalogs of products to easily present in many ways for customers to filter, and search through.

OR

• a minimum of $150

This was a barrier to entry. There wasn't a quick way to get started, and just sell the product.

Now, I have done a fair amount of selling on the eBay platform in the past. I had just expected that eCommerce had been simplified and was at least approaching that level.

It wasn’t with most of the big eCommerce platforms.

You have a whole lot of hoops to jump through, and they are expensive (at least relative to this project’s Q4 goals) hoops.

I’d caught a real, honest-to-goodness Snag.

Switching to Low-Fi

This was a fun, and important project for the family; but it wasn't so important and rigid that we couldn’t experiment and innovate a bit.

In this case, I decided to give up using the custom domain (which is perfect, by the way).

We ended up finding a platform to use that ticked most of the boxes though.

It didn’t have all the features of Shopify. It is even kind of a pain in the ass to get the addresses to ship to out of the system to print labels. It isn’t that easy to use a custom domain with and keep important things like secure website addresses with SSL intact (this is why I didn’t turn on the custom domain).

What it does have is a simple user interface, easy to use editor, pretty much the same transaction fees as Shopify.

Most importantly though? It took less than 15 minutes to be open for business.

I personally made compromises to what the original vision was.

I’m very glad I did.

We were able to start selling immediately. They’ve hit three digits and made their first money online.

I hadn't let the Snag get its way.

In fact, the sales started even before I got the site up. Bethany had the Facebook audience/Venmo combo going way before I was ready and those direct sales are neck and neck with those coming from eCommerce.

There’s always an easier way to get started.

The next step for Ecommerce is to add a website with custom domain.

The Takeaway

We took a project’s requirements and allowed them to relax.

That’s really being too polite. We took the requirements and blew them away so we could get the “low-fi” version of it out the door.

The lesson in this is the same as I’ve seen in marketing in my work that doesn’t involve the kiddos.

The lesson is to have a “low-fi” version of the idea planned so that you can get something out the door quickly and test it in the world. The things you learn will help shape the more complex version of the idea anyway.

How to Snag the Snag.

Try to figure out how to be only 15 minutes away from shipping the low-fi version of your idea. Either start there, or keep it as a contingency plan in your back pocket.

Could you launch without a perfect landing page?

Probably. Could you use a blog post to launch. A social post? It might even turn out better in the long run.

But are you ready to make that compromise?

This requires acknowledging with your team up front that something is going to happen; and plan the requirements ahead of time for what the minimum viable version of this idea needs to have.

When you inevitably see the Snag coming your way, you’re going to be in good shape. Because you’ve already set a trap for it.

Never let the Snag win.

This week, premium subscribers are going to dig into some “low-fi” campaigns that can be implemented in 15 minutes or less.

🎶 Musical Note: Just dig into this discography headed up by Leon Michels and try to tell me you can’t toss it on in almost any situation. Go ahead. I’ll wait.

If you found value in this weeks issue, please let me know! Just reply to this email or leave a comment.

Most are not great.

In this comment thread, I’m going to be sharing some learnings over the weekend. Feel free to chime in. It’s an open thread!

– Chris

P.S. I’m genuinely thankful to have you in the community.

Update: I’ve been asked about whether or not The Outlaws are running a Black Friday special. The answer is no.

But if you are a premium member and want to give away a yearlong subscription, just have them let me know you sent them and I’ll buy their subscription for a whole year.

No strings or gimmicks.

Did you know that bicycles are rear-wheel-drive?

I hadn’t really ever considered it before. After all there are two wheels.

I had absent-mindedly and subconsciously assumed (just because I hadn’t thought much about it…) that they were both propelling the bike forward.

As I learned…

Front wheels play important roles in cycling. Along with the rear wheel, they balance the cyclist weight. They also are  “shock absorbers” encountering bumps ahead of the rest of the bike. And they are a critical component to enabling the cyclist to steer. But when it comes to the cycle drivetrain, it is only “along for the ride.”

source: physicalcycling.com

When I read this and really considered it (read the bold text one more time.), I couldn’t help but be reminded of this classic McGraw Hill ad.

Marketing gets sales letters opened. Marketing gets sales meetings considered.

Sales continues a conversation often started by marketing and closes deals.

How good that conversation is is up to business leaders. How consistent that conversation is is up to business leaders.

This shared conversation has to be considered, architected, and executed by everyone in the business.

This is true because good marketing and good sales are actually the same thing. They only differ in proximity.

Marketing is selling-long-distance.

Selling is marketing-in-person.

An effective sales effort should be able to carry forward and echo the messages of the marketing, and provide feedback of its lessons learned along the way to inform future directions.

Is your sales effort set up to do this?

I recently saw an example shared by a friend of a sales effort that is.

When you scroll to check out this screenshot, you should know a few things. The sales team (and in this case, the CEO) each have their own “showcase” page on the company website.

On this page you will find not only information on the employee, but sales sheets and downloads specifically branded and labeled with the employee’s name on them. Go ahead, take a look, and I will meet you down below.

When I love about this example, is that it is a tangible situation where a sales rep can lead and open the conversation before marketing gets there. The difference here, is that sales brings marketing along for the ride.

There is not going to be a disparity in messaging.

There is not going to be a worry of attribution to the sales rep. This is an important point, because marketing automation and lead routing systems have led sales folks to distrust corporate websites and actively fight against using them in their outreach.

You read that right, marketing automation doesn’t always lead to the right incentives and rarely looks like this 👇

How can we help sales become more like a marketer-in-person?

Help them with customized assets, and help them understand how valuable a page like the above example actually can be in aiding their own sales process.

You have to market your marketing. And that’s not always easy.

– Chris

P.S. There’s plenty more to come on this subject. For premium subscribers, I’ll be back on Tuesday for Part 2 of our “One-to-many Canvas” walkthrough, and taking this Thanksgiving Day off. I've updated the publishing schedule to reflect that.

🎶 Musical Note: This one builds to a surprising crescendo that deserves headphone listening.

If you found value in this weeks issue, please let me know! Just reply to this email or leave a comment.

In this week’s issue, we’ll take a peek at the calendar.

Let’s take a peek at the calendar as we sit here at the beginning of the week of November 15th.

Here are some pictures of calendars.

Gotta cross out the week of Thanksgiving in the U.S.

And while there are a lot of holidays sprinkled throughout December, we can usually just count out the last two weeks for most decision makers to be “in the office”. This year will likely be no different. (Although this year has taught us that pretty much anything is possible.)

Given these historical precedents, it doesn’t leave much time to set meetings for sales reps.

But our story does not end there. There are more complications, yet.

Home, Home Again.

Many schools around the country are going to be going to a “distance learning only” status beginning after Thanksgiving, and until after winter break.

We’ve had our kindergartner, Harper, in distance learning this year full time and Weston is pre-school age. They’ve been home with us this whole time, and it isnt always easy.

For many parents who’ve transitioned their children back into “in-person” programs, this could be a sudden shock to the system.

That means that for a lot of folks… this upcoming week is the equivalent of the last week before a winter break.

Why does all this matter?

There are lot of parents involved in the buying process, and they are going to have a whole lot less time for spontaneous “15 minutes” one-on-one catchups with salespeople.

Don’t believe me?

This happened after the kids were upstairs playing (for an hour!!?) this afternoon.

The struggle is real.

We may need to shift our sales productivity goals a bit.

Cold asking for 15 minutes of dedicated time of a prospect just put someone through BANT qualification questions might not be the best performing strategy this holiday season.

Now, I’m not saying cold prospecting / cold calling doesnt work anymore. We know it does. I’m suggesting that it might not work as well as it has in more “normal” years.

So what can work?

Sales will likely be relying more heavily on demand generation teams to help generate movement this holiday season. Here’s how to think about a coordinated strategy.

Pull, don’t Push

Net new sales can sometimes feel like pushing a boulder uphill.

So how can we give it some oomph?

We have to focus on getting more results from every action we take.

Most people start forgetting about efficiency, efficacy, and other alliterative E words toward the end of the quarter.

Despite all the metaphors, here is a way to apply this to sales and demand gen.

Let’s plot it out.

You may ask yourself, “What the heck is that?”

There are two spectrums here.

1. Cold vs. Warm leads

2. One-to-one sales calls vs. One-to-many sessions

OK. So what is a one-to-many session?

Of course, it depends. You might call them webinars, group demos, Q&A sessions, office hours, cohorts, classes, free trainings, or something even more inventive than all those things put together.

The important part is that it is an event with a fixed time slot (or choice of a scarce number of fixed time slots) that you can invite people to.

Why should you add a one-to-many session to your arsenal this winter?

There are distinct advantages that this type of ask has over a traditional sales call.

One-to-many sessions are typically:

• “take it or leave it” - The time slot is what it is. Will they adapt their schedule or not?

• “come and go” - They can show up late (or not at all) and you won’t chase them.

• ”recorded” - unlike a traditional ‘noshow’, this session is available on-demand for consumption any time.

• “no pressure” - You aren’t putting anyone on the spot, and can take the time to address all the traditional pushback and buying questions.

Sounds good to me. So what now?

Let’s take a look back at the 2 x 2.

Let’s assume these are the likely response rates for each strategy.

Wouldn’t it be prudent to make sure you have your bases covered on the HIGH and MEDIUM side before you spend time on the LOW end of things?

At the risk of spoiling what we’ll cover in this week’s Actionable Framework on Tuesday, Let’s spell that out a little more.

Asking a warm list to attend a group product demo or webinar via email is likely to get you a higher response rate than asking the same of a cold list.

Asking a warm list to attend a on-to-one sales call via email is likely to get you a higher response rate than asking the same of a cold list.

The likely return is higher there in both of these instances.

Again, I’m not advocating for halting all activities related to cold prospecting for one-to-one sales calls.

But if that’s your first play, you may be getting low “performance per watt.”

Bad News, Good News

So we basically have one week (this week) to set up our December for success.

But, sometimes there is magic in constraints.

Up Next

P.S. I’ve (again) put together some worksheets with further detail that premium subscribers are going to dig into on Tuesday.

(Update: Here’s a link to Tuesday’s post.

Know someone who might need it?

Give a gift subscription

I’ll leave you with the song that’s on as I hit send.

If you found value in this weeks issue, please subscribe if you haven’t already and share The Outlaws of Demand with someone who could use it in their work! Every new member helps build a community.

If a leader walks by a pile of trash without picking it up, why should anyone else bother?

True leaders set the tone.

And the best of them inspire their team to do great things.

I was a counselor at a summer camp in the Texas Hill Country. I was a camper there too. 14 years combined. (With many alumni camps into adulthood!)

The remarkable thing about this camp is that most of the other counselors had been campers their entire lives too.

What made camp so great that kept us coming back? What made it so sticky?

There are actually a lot of marketing lessons to be mined from my experience there in the future.

But for this, the second “weekly” issue of 𝚃𝚑𝚎 𝙾𝚞𝚝𝚕𝚊𝚠𝚜 𝚘𝚏 𝙳𝚎𝚖𝚊𝚗𝚍, I want to just share a page from the counselor's handbook we were given.

I've been thinking about this page a lot this week.

Most of what is on this page just came natural to us through the norms that had been set by those that came before than us.

So much so that by the time we first laid our eyes on it as first-time counselors, all we really did was nod our head. We knew this because it was already ingrained in us.

"Yep. Makes sense."

When you see it all there though, it really comes into focus. It’s one of those pages that you make a copy of because it says everything you already know but never want to forget.

How we treat others is an incredibly important part of keeping people coming back.

My batting average on these principles hasn't always been 1000.

But when I fall short of them, I try to pick up from where I left off and try again.

Having real and solid principles to stand by (and live by) gives us a fighting chance at providing a guiding light for our teams is as important as ever.

If we are in it for the long term, we have to have a point of view, a stance. We have to live the path we want people to follow.

These days, attention is the most scarce resource of all. For us marketers, it’s gold.

If we can stand by something and for something, people might just have a reason to pay attention and keep coming back.

I’ll be back on Tuesday.

In case you missed it, I published three issues last week.
- The Six Core Segments (for everyone)
- The Takeaway Method (for premium members)
- Weekend Project #1: The Takeaway Planner (for premium members)

Thanks for reading today’s newsletter. If you have thoughts, I’d love to hear them. And if you aren’t already, please consider subscribing to becoming a premium member so you can gain access to additional issues each week.

• The Actionable Framework, published Tuesdays

• The Weekend Project, published Thursdays

Share The Outlaws of Demand

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We are relegated to Brady Bunch grids, chat room antics, email, and other styles of getting our message across. This goes for talking with coworkers, your team, or even your customers.

If 2020 has taught me anything, it’s this: Most companies are terrible at email.

It’s usually because one too many people are on the thread, or it could be that someone on the team sent an irrelevant message to the entire database.

Today, email is not the only channel for most people. But for the purposes of today’s conversation, we will focus there because it has been a constant across the decades of modern marketing. We will focus more on choosing channels in an upcoming issue.

Why?

When I ask folks questions like “Why are you so terrible at email?”… I usually hear something like: “We are great at email. We send out e-blasts to everyone once a month!”.

They are “spraying and praying” that their “blast” will make it rain as Camille is illustrating below.

When I think about that, I weep a little for their team and for their customers.

The strategy there is all about cadence, and not about personalization.

What happens when a message isn’t relevant at all to the cauliflower and kalamatas?

When I am done shedding tears, I think “There has got to be a better way.”

Wouldn’t you know it? There is.

It’s called segmenting your list!

Now, while this may sound complex, we don’t always need to get fancy with it.

In fact, we can take just a few minutes and go from chopped salad to nice and organized. Even if we allow for the occasional overlap.

The truth is that there are very few “one size fits all” formulas in business. But I have found that there is a decent baseline. Hopefully, you will find this helpful to self-diagnose your own segmentation strategies or to get you started.

The Six Core Segments

Just about every company contact database can be chopped up this way.

• 1. Customers (segmented in many different ways)
  You’ll have little slices in here too: new, active, inactive, “slipping”, “hasn’t logged in in over 30 days”, segments by Plan, etc…

• 2. Employees, Teams, and Internal Marketing
  Marketing your initiatives and mission to your employees is more important than ever now that we are separated and no longer under the same four walls.

• 3. Future Customers
  This is a big bucket. One of the major segments is “in Active Opportunity”. You are in active relationship building mode and may want to send things from their rep.

• 4. Partners, Resellers, and Affiliates
  These are the folks who are your extended sales team. Teach them how to share the message you want to be spread In the world.

• 5. Friends, Fans, and Subscribers
  There are some folks who just are fans of the brand and may not be in the weeds of your product. How do you want to share your message with them? Should brand marketing have different positioning when you launch something new? Of course, it depends.

• 6. Shareholders, Insiders, and Alumni.
  These are the folks that care to see the company succeed for all sorts of reasons. How can you keep them updated so that it doesn’t feel like a chore or they are being marketed to?

Note that shareholders is last. I know in business school everything was focused on increasing shareholder’s wealth. But the only way to do that is to take care of your customers and your team first. That’s why it’s last on the list. No less important, but make sure you are communicating regularly with the other segments first.

Now, that is better.

Each one of these segments can be chopped up even further, and there will be overlap between the two. But when you have each of these segments clearly defined in a dynamic smart list in your contact database you can start to do magical things.

You can send to a list, but exclude another list. (Inclusion/Exclusion are a demand generation pro’s secret weapon.)

Here’s a concrete example of how you can use these segments in tandem.

(+5,-3) All friends, fans, and subscribers; but not those with open opportunities.

This will allow you to more closely control a product marketing message by having your sales team personally send out that announcement to their open opportunities.

There are infinite combinations, and we will dig into them as time goes on.

Your homework is to set these segments up in your CRM now. We may be using them in the future. ;)

Pop Quiz

Your company just made some fly merch… which of the core segments would care? Which should you send for free? Offer for free? Offer for sale?

If your company’s merch looks like this👆, just sign me up now. Add a segment for Chris to your CRM now. I’m buying.

I want know from The Outlaws, what major segment do you use that I did not cover? Hit reply and let me know.

Thanks for reading today’s newsletter. If you have thoughts, I’d love to hear them. And as always, consider subscribing to becoming a premium member so you can gain access to additional issues each week.

• The Actionable Framework, published Tuesdays

• The Weekend Project, published Thursdays

Share The Outlaws of Demand

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P.S. I’ve put together some worksheets with further detail that premium subscribers are going to dig into on Tuesday. My daughter found one and has already gotten started.

If you already know you want to sign up now so you don’t miss the first issue on November 1st, here’s your call to action.

Subscribe now

In the meantime, tell your friends!

Now let’s dig into why you might want to do that.

Why join the Outlaws?

You need to have both a strong foundation in your work and also to understand the needs of the modern buyer. The technology, new buzzwords, and everything else (the news… don’t even get me started on the news!) just races by and it can seem impossible to keep up. Let alone, master the basics.

You are a modern marketer trying to do the best job you can. I am in the same boat. While I have been able to do a few things in this space, I am never done learning. So I am determined to learn as much as I can about sparking action with an audience.

I’m going to start learning and sharing everything with you. An open book, I am.

Apologies for the Yodaspeak.

So that’s what we will focus on here. Keeping you updated on what’s really going on with the world of demand generation, marketing ops, and the broader ecosystem.

You’ll learn from practitioners working in the field every day.

I asked about what kind of resources people might want and listened to what you said…

So we are “officially launching” November 1st, but there will be issues published in “warmup week”. So here it is what you’ll get.

Publishing Schedule & Premium Features.

Free: 1 issue weekly

• The Outlaw Weekly, published Sundays

• Access via email and website.

Premium: 3+ Issues Weekly & Audio Versions

• Full access to every post on demandoutlaws.com

• The Actionable Framework, published Tuesdays

• The Weekend Project, published Thursdays

• Access via email, website, and your podcast player

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Sincerely yours,

Chris Handy

P.S. This is pretty much the mood around here… I’ll leave you with this.

P.P.S. Tell a friend.

Share The Outlaws of Demand

It seemingly takes forever to get anyone’s attention – because everyone’s running around busy doing their jobs.

The folks in the restaurant are cooking, serving, working on the expo line, talking with customers, and just generally running the restaurant as it stands today – Serving the current customers, they’re too busy to look up and see the brand new customers waiting at the front of the store.

How many times have you left in a situation like this where you couldn’t get noticed fast enough. Now think back to the last time you went to a business to business type website. Were you met with a host or were you met with the wall of friction… with the wall of waiting… with a company too busy to look up from what they were doing to give you the time of day – and how many times have you left that experience because you couldn’t get an answer.

Even the times you pushed through how many times have you not gotten a response either in time (or ever)?

It’s these considerations we need to make as we design our own customer experiences and it’s time to consider how we can have a better host like experience with every customer interaction.