“Is this the worst-ever salesletter?” asks Denny Hatch

Plus not one, but two apologies for my slack incompetence – and the return of the Hound of Newton Abbott

The splendid Denny Hatch put up the following literary turd  yesterday as a candidate for the worst-ever salesletter.

It has to be a serious contender, neatly adding pig-ignorant incomprehensibility to boastful, jargonesque twaddle, with a dash of pushy ignorance.

The opening is sickeningly familiar. I regularly get stuff from people who “missed me”, or want to “set up time to talk”.

The feeling is rarely reciprocated. Here is the abortion in question:

John,

I missed you in the office today when I called. I would like to set up an appointment with you as soon as possible to discuss some enterprise marketing solutions that are leading the industry. 

I want to bring you up to speed on what we are doing to shorten the distance between advertising dollars spend and ROI with today’s digital marketing. If you are like my other advertisers, you will like the targeted buyer-behavior-based-marketing-campaigns that are leading the industry with great quality engagement all across the web. We now have almost a year on these campaigns and I am so excited to say that we are exceeding industry averages in results on every campaign we have because of the additional proprietary data we use to target your right buyers.  Guaranteed impressions to the right buyer with measurable results and emailed lead reports to you every day are standard in our full service campaigns! 

Can we set up a brief phone call to discuss where exactly we can help you gain the most market share? I assure you, the information we share regarding these advancements will be beneficial to you regardless if we move forward or not. I would like the opportunity to share how these are driving greater ROI for all of our advertisers.

Kindest Regards,
Margaret

Are you open to discussing how we can help you build more effective marketing strategies to efficiently target all your buyers all across the web in real time? This allows us to get you and your message in front of those buyers who are actively seeking you, your services and even those engaging with your competitors in real time but all across the internet on the sites they visit most. The campaigns are scalable and can be designed to fit any geographical target audience all the way to global.

I  often wonder what unreal time is, by the way. But not as often as I wonder exactly how incompetent I am.

For instance a while ago I floated two contests. One was to caption a picture of me with my partner Al’s ferocious hound Basil – seen above in a rare moment of repose. The other was to do with a dreadful website for a restaurant on The Shard

That offered a prize (or penalty) of a free dinner with me.

The Basil one offered a free place at Eadim.

I then completely forgot about both of these brilliant wheezes.

Actually, that’s a lie. Every now and then I felt a guilty twinge.

This has now become so painful that I shall return to both soon, asking for new entries.

If you have already bought a place at EADIM and you give the best answer to the caption contest, I will refund your investment.

If you have not, then you can get a substantial discount if you:

a) Read this blog regularly

b) Are now or have ever been my client

c) Follow me on facebook or twitter or are a friend on linked-in

d) Have attended previously

If you come up with the best comment on the Shard ad, I will honour my promise to wine and dine you.

More about that one shortly. Dinner can wait; EADIM can’t.