I happened to watch the NFL night game in which Miami’s great wideout Tyreek Hill got hurt. The network seemed to replay his injury repeatedly for a few painful minutes. The game stopped.

The following day, the Dolphins confirmed that Hill is out for the season with left knee dislocation and torn ligaments, including the Anterior Cruciate Ligament. Ouch. ACL tears come with estimates of roughly a one-year absence, but multiple ligaments being torn could result in a longer timetable.

Sadly, season-ending sports injuries are very common. One source said that in 2019, there were 158 players who suffered season-ending injuries out of roughly 2,000 players under contract to NFL teams. Football Hall of Fame quarterback Joe Theismann, whose own career was cut short by an in-game injury, said of the experience “Football is played by very large, fast men running at each other at top speed.” That doesn’t take away the pain, it just helps to characterize it.

Back to Tyreek Hill. Something struck me about watching Hill in the moments following his injury. When they put him onto the golf cart to take him off the field, he understandably must have been in extreme pain. But did you see the look on his face? He was smiling and waving to the fans in the stands. Let that sink in for a moment. A body part is twisted in the wrong direction, and he is smiling at the fans. We’re talking ear to ear grin. With a wave to match.

There are some lessons to learn here.

• Professional sports are played for the fans. He gets it.
• It is OK to put on a brave face. Smile in the midst of pain.
• It is also OK to cry once in a while.

Full disclosure – I watched that game from my hospital room, just a few days removed from open heart surgery. I was in pain but not smiling. My respect for Tyreek Hill grew geometrically.

We can all use a little more positivity in our lives. Recently I signed up for the Mindfulness newsletters that arrive in LinkedIn. This newsletter has more than 165,000 subscribers. Even though I grew up in the largest metro area in North America, I don’t think I know 165,000 people. These guys are definitely doing things right.

Today’s newsletter was more of a listicle. 7 Mini Mindfulness Boosts You Can Do in 10 Seconds.

Here goes…

1. One Slow Breath Inhale deeply… exhale slowly. A single conscious breath sends a wave of calm through the body and reboots focus. Try it – it works!
2. Gratitude Spark Think of one thing you’re grateful for right now, big or small. It activates positivity instantly. Gratitude moments are real. You can never have enough gratitude.
3. Stand Up & Stretch Gently release tension: stretch your shoulders, roll your neck, or simply lift your arms. Feel the shift. The thought here is to get out of your chair and get some movement happening. Tough to do when you’re in a chair for 8 or more hours a day, but well worth it.
4. Mindful Sip Hold a sip of tea or water. Notice its taste, temperature, texture. Then swallow with awareness. Maybe because I don’t know what “swallow with awareness” means, but to my surprise, this one didn’t work as well with coffee. So I switched to water for the mindful sip.
5. Sound or Posture Check Listen deeply to one ambient sound—or check your posture, straighten your spine, soften your shoulders.
6. Kind Thought or Mantra Silently repeat a phrase like “May I be calm” or “I am doing my best.” It is the positiveness of what you’re repeating that matters.
7. Anchor to Now Pause for a second. Notice what you see, hear, or feel. Bring yourself fully into this moment. Now we’re talking!

Why These Tiny Moments Matter

• These micro-resets may feel small – but research shows they support emotional balance, mental clarity, and better self-awareness, especially when repeated.
• Over time, these micro-moments form a mindfulness habit that grounds your mind throughout the day.

None of these adds more than a few seconds to what you’re doing in your day, but the value they bring is immeasurable. Kudos to the Mindfulness team for spreading the good news.

If you want to sign up for Mindfulness by Positivity, visit https://www.linkedin.com/company/positivity-said/posts/?feedView=all.

Many years ago, the content marketing team at HGS wrote a wonderful blog post about having a beer with a chatbot. The chatbot was a surprisingly engaging, witty, and articulate fellow. There was even a sequel piece a few months later. This was back in 2018, so the sheer power of AI as we know it today was barely hinted at in those days. AI chatbots have come a long way, or have they?

Nearly every department of a company can find a use case for deploying AI. Not content to merely use AI chatbots to screen resumes in the hunt for precious keywords (opting out of AI in favor of human eyes on your application was, alas, a brief trend), talent acquisition teams have begun deploying chatbots as job interviewers. Faceless voices and avatars backed by AI are increasingly being used in interviews. These autonomous interviewers are part of a wave of artificial intelligence known as “agentic AI,” in which AI agents are directed to act on their own to generate real-time conversations and build on responses.

The trend began, well intended enough, driven by tech start-ups that developed robot interviewers to help employers talk to more candidates and reduce the load on human recruiters.

But it doesn’t exactly work that way, at least not in my experience. Over the past few months, I’ve had two interviews with a chatbot – both experiences were negative. The AI interviewers are apparently trained to hear for certain responses, and when mine were different, the calls ended abruptly. I then received a generic rejection email; one was signed by the chatbot. Ouch.

Maybe I just haven’t met the right bot. The chatbots that interviewed me – these were from different companies, although both were for marketing leadership roles – frequently glitched and asked several questions in a row. I was given no time to answer.  The chatbots may not have been trained in open-ended questioning. Forget the opportunity to ask questions or seek clarification. The AI chatbot would just respond with variations on “oh that is a good question. We will have to get back to you on that.” These were transmit-only interviews that went nowhere.

My take? Deploying AI chatbots in the interview process is not ready for prime time. A company that doesn’t value your time enough to provide some human interaction doesn’t really want you there.  

Perhaps it is because I watched the 50th anniversary of Saturday Night Live specials this weekend (the music special had some amazing performances), or perhaps it is the upcoming turn of a certain age, but now seems like a good time to take stock and remark on an anniversary of my own. I started writing this blog fifteen years ago. My intentions were many: to experiment with then-nascent blogging technology, to keep the journalistic muscles exercised, to write about customer experience and marketing related topics, to feed the content beast, and of course to sprinkle in a bit of music.

For the most part, I’ve stayed true to the original intentions. Blog posts have covered how to relate to an audience, creating content that your readers will care about, making the most of what’s outside your control, lessons learned from the likes of David Bowie and the Grateful Dead (not to mention the Sex Pistols and Duran Duran), challenging yourself and going beyond your stretch goals, and more. I’ve taken issue with the sorry state of applicant tracking systems, and provided a sneak peek into two upcoming books.

The biggest challenge in writing a blog is having something to say. I am both my best editor and worst critic – usually at the same time. Will it resonate with anyone else? Do I come off as harsh? When is the right time to write this? Is my knowledge of the topic enough to write about it?

Fifteen years in, and I feel like I am just getting started. Thanks for reading.

Much of my love for literature and poetry comes from my paternal grandmother, who lived with us for about 15 years. She had a degenerative eye disease named Retinitis Pigmentosa. By age 40 she was completely blind. Despite losing her sight at a young age, she had a phenomenal memory for books, songs, and poems. She could recite entire lines and verses to suit almost any situation. It would take me many years to sort through whether they were classic poetry or dirty limericks. Sometimes both. One such poem she was fond of reciting was “when a hundred years have come and gone, and a hundred more to back it, who will be around to say t ’was I that wore the tattered jacket?”. Who wrote that line? Good question. My grandmother thought it was Robert Burns or possibly Nicholas Brady. ChatGPT claims it comes from “The Tattered Jacket” by Robert Service, although I’ve searched his archive and can’t find it. There is an Anglican hymn with a similar theme but none of the same lyrics. Regardless of who wrote it, the poem certainly is powerful.

What does the line mean? There are a few theories. One theory is the details of some events get lost in the passage of time. Who was the first woman inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? That was a long time ago but an easy answer – Aretha Franklin! Ah, but who was the second? For this music trivia nerd, the answer is almost as easy – there were three (Florence Ballard, Diana Ross, and Mary Wilson of the Supremes). Although the first to accomplish a feat is almost always remembered, there are dozens of others who have also done it. So the tattered jacket could have been worn by anyone.

A second theory looks at the grand scheme of things. Does it really matter who did what and to whom? Maybe to a writer of murder mysteries. The butler doesn’t always do it.

The third theory involves attribution. Successful marketers can track (almost) every penny spent to a specific activity that either generates pipeline or publicity. That website retargeting campaign that brought in a $5 million per year client, or that random conversation at a trade show that sparked a discussion that a year later was a closed deal, or that blog post that an influencer listened to and called you to learn more. We all have a few of those in our portfolio. You can point to a particular element in the mix as the one igniting moment. Even with a sales cycle that can take years (and multi-million, multi-year deals often take a year or more to close), you can track an activity to it.

Yes, even after 100 years, you can still point to that campaign as the one that made the day.

My job search was conducted across four different workstreams:

• Applying to posted jobs
• Reaching out to LinkedIn connections
• Direct outreach – Researching companies based on industry news
• Interacting with headhunters

Each has their plusses and minuses as I’ve worked through them to land a job. Applying to posted jobs and interacting with headhunters are basically self-explanatory, so this blog post will lean into what I mean by direct outreach.

Direct outreach begins with news sources that will help you identify companies to target. There are tons of news sources out there. You can set up Google Alerts about specific companies or topics. News feeds such as Feedly are easy to set up and maintain. You can also search for newsletters about industry events. Companies such as Crunchbase, G2, or Owler that post reviews and comparisons of products can be very informative. In my previous post about the quantity of choices in the marketing tech stack, I found a lot of repository-with-calendar companies by feeding prompts into Crunchbase. You can also follow industry analyst firms, which has been my sweet spot. Most of them publish reports about companies in a space or discipline. The inventor of the industry analyst game is Gartner. They publish 80+ reports known as Magic Quadrants. These reports (and numerous others, such as Wave by Forrester, PEAK Matrix by Everest Group, and RadarView by Avasant) mention the capabilities of companies in a specific market, giving you a wide-angle view of the relative positions of the market’s competitors. Since I’ve piloted or co-piloted industry analyst relations programs for decades, I have relationships with those firms. I follow them on LinkedIn and look forward to their posts about new reports. The analysts will sometimes tag the companies that have participated in the reports, or at least those in leadership positions. Viewing the LinkedIn profiles of companies that are tagged is helpful because there are many companies with similar names.

Now that you know who the companies are, you’ll need to find out who to write to at the company. Since I’m looking for a role in marketing, I would start with the Chief Marketing Officer if they have one, or Chief Growth Officer (the senior executive who owns both sales and marketing). You can learn who these people are on LinkedIn or the company’s public website. Remember my blog post about email addresses and phone numbers? Here is where such contact details will come in handy.

Next, write to them! Start out with a bit of congratulations on making Everest Group’s Insurance Intermediaries Services PEAK Matrix® Assessment 2024 or whatever the credential is. Starting with something positive says many things – it shows you’re keeping up with current events, you know some recent news, you’re not making it all about you. and you are acknowledging a job well done. Then explain in a few bullets what you can do for them. Read your email again, and make sure you’ve personalized it. Make sure the addressee’s name and company are spelled correctly. Hit send.

Following up on the send is essential. I have a one-week rule. If they haven’t reached out to me first, I am on the phone to follow up one week after writing to them. A quick reminder that I wrote last week to congratulate them on the credential and let them know how I can help. Simple. It takes about 45 seconds to leave this as a voice mail message. Practice it a few times before picking up the phone.

Direct outreach is an approach that works. I’ve landed jobs lasting years with this method. You can too.

Finding a phone number for a business, or an executive at that business, shouldn’t be an Olympic sport. But find phone numbers is getting increasingly difficult and complicated. The once-common practice of companies listing a phone number in the footer of their website is long gone. Even the investor or media contacts at an organization (me included) have removed their phone numbers from news releases. I did it out of self-defense, because I was getting inundated with calls for employment verification, accounts payable, and sales pitches for everything you could possibly imagine. And even several months after leaving my last role, I still get these calls.

B2B companies typically have a team of Sales Development Reps (AKA Business Development Reps), who reach out to prospects by phone or email to set appointments for the company’s salespeople. So how do they find phone numbers or email addresses? Reps located offshore would often unknowingly populate the CRM with toll-free numbers. I would advise them that most area codes in the 800 range are toll-free numbers, which are rarely answered by someone who works for that company. In fact, the people answering those numbers probably work for an outsourced customer care partner (our competitors). Not only would the agent taking the call not know who that decision maker is, they wouldn’t have contact information or the ability to transfer a call to them. Toss out the toll-free number and continue searching.

You can consult a search engine, but the chances are excellent that the phone number will be wrong, disconnected, or not answered by humans. Aren’t there tons of companies that claim to sell contact information? Sure. ZoomInfo, UpLead, Apollo, and others provide email addresses and phone numbers. But these are not especially accurate. The email addresses stand a better chance of being correct because there are only a handful of email address conventions (e.g., first initial then last name, or first name dot last name, followed by the email domain) so if you find one person’s email address at a company you can guess your way to finding your prospect’s email address. Telephone numbers are a totally different story. My experience shows that 10% to 20% of company phone numbers provided by ZoomInfo and their ilk are correct, and maybe 5% of the individual phone numbers will get you to the correct person.

Once you’ve found a number for the company, the next hurdle is reaching the prospect. Call the main number and set the bar low. Gone are the days when a helpful receptionist would answer and route your call. Press 1 for Sales, press 2 for HR (usually a link to an employment verification service that I hope isn’t me), press 3 for Customer Support, and so on. Good luck getting a human. And if they have a dial-by-name directory, run screaming.

Companies such as Ring Central, Mitel, Dialpad, 8×8 and more develop dial-by-name directories. Unfortunately, they are all frustrating to use. With technology that has been around for more than 30 years, why doesn’t it work? Can we use AI to make them useful?

As the eternal optimist, I think we can. Full disclosure – I’ve never purchased, installed, implemented, or maintained a dial-by-name directory in my life. I just try to use the things. This is all just conjecture based on some research I’ve done on the subject. Here goes…

AI can significantly enhance dial-by-name directories by improving their accuracy, efficiency, and user experience. Here are several ways AI can be applied:

• Speech Recognition: Implement advanced speech recognition algorithms to accurately transcribe spoken names. AI models trained on large datasets can better understand diverse accents and pronunciation variations to improve recognition accuracy.
• Natural Language Processing (NLP): Utilize NLP algorithms to interpret user queries and match them with the most relevant names in the directory. This includes understanding synonyms, variations in naming conventions, and contextual clues to provide more accurate results.
• Machine Learning: Train the models to continually improve recognition accuracy by learning from user interactions and feedback. Maybe these directories don’t get enough use for machine learning to learn anything?
• Contextual Understanding: Develop AI systems capable of understanding the context of a conversation to refine search results. For example, if a user asks for “Kevin from the marketing department,” the system should prioritize names matching both “Kevin” and “marketing” over other results.
• Integration with Other Systems: Can you integrate the AI-powered dial-by-name directories with other enterprise systems such as HR databases? This would go a long way toward matching the letters on the dial pad with up-to-date contact information.

By leveraging AI technologies, dial-by-name directories should become more accurate, efficient, and a lot less frustrating to use.