Don't neg me, bro!

That #quarantinelife has a way of messing with your mind. With no place to go and so little to do outside of your daily responsibilities, it's easy for the mind to wander and conjure up random ridiculousness.

Such was the case last week, as I sat by the fire in my back yard thinking about, of all the most random things a 41 year-old married man's mind can think of: the god-awful VH1 TV series, "The Pickup Artist." That was the one featuring a self-proclaimed "seduction artist" named Mystery teaching 9 poor schlubs his techniques for hitting on women so they could feel better about themselves, I suppose.

At any rate, one of the seduction artist's core strategies was "negging," which is basically the subtle art of complimenting someone while also insulting or putting them down as a means of emotional manipulation. It's evidently pretty common and looks something like this:

“Well, don't you look fabulous? I would never have the courage to wear my hair like that.”

A real-life Mystery

Last week, I received another in a recent flood of business emails and LinkedIn invitations. I expect that everyone is seeing an uptick in these (I'm sure there are numbers about it somewhere, but I haven't found them), considering how little else there is to do besides look for new market opportunities during stay-at-home orders.

But one email in particular caught my eye. It was from a marketing agency specializing in website optimization (don't they all?) that thought they could help a small, struggling business like mine score TONS of new traffic and leads, written with exactly the sort of "bro"attitude and "digital entrepreneur" smarm we've come to expect in this day and age.

After highlighting a few of my better known clients to at least try and acknowledge bits of my prior success, the author then launched into a laundry list of things I'm doing wrong: my HTML tags (title, meta, header) were either all wrong or nonexistent; I didn't have enough of or the right keywords across my site, and the mobile loading time was too slow.

I was taken aback by the bluntness and sense of aggression in an introductory message, but it wasn't till the initial shock had worn off that I'd understood this dude was negging me.

Times aren't a-changing that much

Nevermind for a minute that I keep my business purposely small. Or that most of my new work comes from referrals from current and previous clients and from extremely targeted introductions through an extensive network of professionals I've spent years cultivating.

I wasn't going to be interested in anything the guy was selling because I'm not actively looking to grow the business right now or, really, anytime in the immediate future. But I still enjoy connecting with people and find a lot of value in long-term relationship building because you just never know.

Ordinarily, I'm happy to respond to people even when it's obvious they're trying to sell me something. It's not ideal that they view our LinkedIn connection as merely a transactional one, but at least it's transparent and harmless.

But this guy, THIS GUY! This guy tossed all basic professional courtesy and business development best practices right out the window. He failed to do any due diligence about the business or the owner. He failed to even pretend like he was interested in a business relationship. And, most importantly, he assumed that I was struggling and needed a hero like him to save me.

Hence, the neg.

By calling out in the most overt manner possible what he thought were my failures, the would-be seller was trying to position himself as the instant cure to all that ailed me. He clearly believed I should be thankful for receiving the right message at just the right time and assumed that it'd lead to a demo or some other business interaction.

But like the women in that shitty VH1 show, he might've been surprised to learn that people don't generally like to be insulted. Even in normal times they certainly don't like being insulted and, in most cases, implying that they're somehow stupid or otherwise incompetent. That's an even stronger possibility in times when people actually *are* struggling, usually through no fault or action of their own.

It's totally fine and acceptable to try new approaches to getting a prospect's attention and cut through the noise at a time when everyone is getting bombarded with emails and connection requests because we can't actually do it in real life. But quarantine or not, if you ever want my time, attention, and my business then don't neg me, bro.

Scott Stransky is the founder and principal marketing writer at Full Funnel Content, a boutique content and copywriting firm catering exclusively to the B2B market, who recently found out that VH1 still exists.