I See Dead People

I wanted to make this kind of light and keep in context with Halloween.  Spooky, fun, scary, skeletons and ghosts, candy, all that. I still do, but the concept in and of itself is a sobering one, and not new in the slightest..   

I had a conversation Halloween morning with one of our newly promoted Sales Directors, Mason Neely, about where we have come from as a company, where we are now, and where we are going.  In the true spirit of Halloween, the theme ended up on the dead.

Years ago I remember reading about Facebook’s ‘Dead Body’ Problem - at some point there will be more Facebook “users” that are dead than alive (spooooooky!)  It makes sense if you think about it. Our friends, our family members, our acquaintances, ourselves - we all create a profile. At some point we will all die (whaaat??).  What happens to our social media profiles then? The joke has always been, “when I die, make sure you delete my browser history.”

Not to bum everyone out that we’re all going to die someday (it’s true, I promise), the interesting part of this is that every sales professional has made this call, “Hi, may I be transferred to Ron Smyth?  “Sorry, Ron passed away a year ago.” Every sales professional that is reading this article right now not only knows that this has happened to them, but they can recall the moment it happened.  I asked my wife who is also in sales if she had gone through this phenomenon - she immediately expressed how and when it happened to her.  This is a shared experience that we have ALL have had to deal with.  

Ask any of your friends that are in sales or have spent a meaningful amount of time time cold calling if this has happened to them...  Guess what, sales professional? You get to deal with death and the concept of your own mortality today! Talk about sobering.

I digress.  I wanted to address the ‘Dead Body’ Problem (spooooooky).   If your Facebook account goes inactive, it’s up to your family or friends to tell them if you don’t set up a legacy contact.  If your Twitter goes inactive for more than 6 months they deactivate it automatically. Pinterest no such luck, you exist forever.  LinkedIn? You exist forever.

LinkedIn is so easy.  It’s all predicated upon creating a profile and that person keeping it up to date.  At what point are you trying to connect with and send InMails to dead people? It is definitely happening right now.  Data decay in general happens at a rate of 30% - 40% every year - this includes people moving to other companies, retiring, etc.  Similarly, when someone retires, are they updating their social media profiles to reflect that?

Eventually the dead and retired, non-active users will outweigh the living.  Sales and marketing professionals will spend the majority of their time prospecting to and trying to engage with people that will never respond, mostly because they can’t.  

The company that I work for was born of a simple concept, do a thing that sales and marketing professionals are already doing or trying to do, but do it better and for a lower cost than what it would be for them to do it any other way.  Building org charts and digging up contact details like direct dials and email addresses were obvious - so was refreshing the data (no dead people). In the last 10+ years we have listened to our clients and users to dig up 100+ additional data points that they used to spend most of their day trying to find on their own and would otherwise have to manually refresh.

The fact that the data we maintain is constantly refreshed by AI and an actual research team to verify and QA, positions us in a way that no other data source, program or vendor can match.  If technology alone is the sole method of verification, which in many cases uses social media to do this, it is “verifying” data points with unverified, possibly dead data - this does not make a lot of sense.  

We don’t want our clients to ever experience a “Dead Body Problem.”  Thankfully they never have to, it's kind of like having a sixth sense.