006: This season's most harmful survey practice

You've seen others use it and wonder if you should use it yourself: the technique where you segment or bucket prospects.  This practice violates several psychological principles and most are methodologically unsound so that you drive people away, gather misinformation and make some people think poorly of you.  Avoid it.  Here's why.

Takeaways:

• As it is popularly used, this practice suffers from methodological errors and violates principles of psychological measurement with the predictable result of lower response rates and uninterpretable results.

• We like to think we are complex and have many layers to us, so don't then assume others can be simply described by one and only one category.  Use surveys to extract the full depth and complexity of those you want to pull into your orbit.

• As I've preached before, treat prospects as you would a first date.  Would you ask your date a single question ("Are you adventurous, creative, reserved or intelligent?  You can only pick one!") and then design the evening around that bucket?  Not unless you want your date to run away, and that's what your customers are doing.

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