Marketing? Better stay diversified.

Almost daily I see social media folks with good intentions suggest that cold calling is dead. They (incorrectly) write that selling is dead, that no one likes salespeople and that even salespeople don’t like being salespeople.

With good hearts, they suggest such things as changing your title to disguise the fact that you’re in sales. They insist that you abandon your outbound efforts and find your way to the Promised Land (inbound marketing). In their minds, these ideas are mutually exclusive: You are either an old-school salesperson or an enlightened, social-media-wielding non-salesperson.

Unless you want a career change imposed on you in the not-to-distant future, you heed the following advice:

Advice worth taking. I am reminded of an often-told story about Mahatma Gandhi. A mother waited all day to ask Gandhi to tell her diabetic son to stop eating sugar, that it was bad for his health, that it was harming him and that it could kill him.

Gandhi sent this mother and her child away, asking her to return to him in two weeks. The mother returned with the boy two weeks later. Gandhi told the boy to stop eating sugar. The mother asked Gandhi why he couldn’t have told the boy to stop eating sugar two weeks earlier. Gandhi replied that, at the time, he himself was eating too much sugar. Gandhi did not believe that he had the moral authority to tell the boy to stop eating sugar. He wasn’t willing to ask the boy to do something he wasn’t already doing.