The increase in response will astound you.
This might sound completely obvious, but the marketing/advertising/sales mainstream has been pushing things the other way for a long time now. I'll give you a couple of examples—
>> Self-advertising on LinkedIn. If you write in your profile headline that you do "Finance at Microsoft", that sounds important. But if after deciphering your description ("Finance Manager", "leading cloud economics user engagements [sic]", "position the financial advantages of the cloud", "directly with our most strategic customers", "the financial and technical landscape of the cloud" etc etc) it then turns out that you're a glorified salesperson at best, you've just treated every single person that clicked on your profile because they read you do "Finance at Microsoft" like a complete idiot. And they will mind.
>> Dealing with customers that want to leave. Our agency recently quit an expensive SaaS product (10K+/year) we found we no longer needed. They're having a hard time letting us go, and they keep sending us offers. We have told them in no unclear terms on at least three occasions that we don't intend to renew. Yet this kind of stuff keeps coming: "To ensure your account remains active and uninterrupted, could you please confirm whether Cavegn intends to renew? Upon your confirmation, we can make the necessary adjustments to your account." Combine this with an offer to continue at a drastic discount, which suggests that either we've been f'ed over regarding price over the last 12 months, or the product is worth a lot less than everyone thinks...
"Make your prospect an offer so good only an idiot would refuse" does not, I repeat: NOT suggest that you should assume your customer actually is an idiot. Not to mention that you're wasting your time trying to convince someone of your product who has already told you three times they don't want it.
Ogilvy famously said, "Your customer isn't a moron, she is your wife." That may be a bit out of time today, but it's nonetheless true. At the end of the day, every single one of your messages addresses the individual that receives it. And they'll instinctively resent being treated like they were stupid and had the attention span of a goldfish.
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