I was at a training recently and they had this one booth with some messaging on their booth that was like, right in-your-face kind of messaging. And I could imagine people walking by, some people going like, “Oh my God! I can’t believe somebody did that.” And they’re deeply offended.

From my personal experience, I had created a video for YouTube called, “Lessons from a Shoe Shine Man” and it has received the most views and the most comments and I get comments like, “Man, that was really deep, I learned a lot” and I also get comments like, “You bastard! You’re putting down people that shine shoes for a living!” So you have got these two extremes on the same message. But it’s getting noticed and it’s getting viewed.

So this is basically how it applies to sales and how it applies to business. If you’re communicating with your target audience via email or on a sign, if your sign isn’t controversial enough and isn’t in your face, then most people are not noticing it and they are not taking action. So my advice to you is, to create a message that gets people to pay attention to it, the message would jump out at them, they’ll look at it and be inspired enough to grab it and deal with you. The people that were offended were not planning to do business with you anyway. And the people in the middle are more likely to pay attention to your message when you have a controversial message as opposed to something that’s vanilla and easy for them to yawn it off and flip the page.