Focus on ideas to move you towards your goals and away from your pain points.
Do you ever go to a conference or even a program and come back with your head spinning with tons of great ideas to implement? Then you get back to the office the following day and don’t know where to begin? Your are psyched to get going but you have so many thoughts, quotes, visuals, stories, etc. etc. in your head that you feel like you are going to burst, literally.
Stop. Calibrate. And listen. (Okay enough 1990s rap!)
But really stop trying to implement all of the great ideas that you just learned about. You can’t do them all at once and you are going to get frustrated with yourself and your team if you even try to do that.
Realizing that you can only one or maybe two great ideas amongst all of your other responsibilities, start by doing a brain dump of everything circling in your head.
Once you have done that, pick up to three of the ideas and move forward with those. Why three? I don’t know. It’s more than one to satisfy us overachievers and not too many to seem insurmountable. I also believe in the power of threes. I bet you didn’t think I was so superstitious, did you?
These three ideas don’t have to big, brand new, super awesome process or campaigns or huge initiatives, but may just be slight tweaks to how you already do something.
I just finished the SMPS Southeastern Regional Conference and my mind is spinning. In fact that is what inspired this post. If you haven’t been to a regional conference, stop what you are doing and register for yours today. I mean it. Do it. It was one of the best experiences I have had as a marketer in the eight years I have been doing this.
Okay, I am finished with my commercial. Back to our regularly scheduled programming.
The three awesome ideas I am going to focus my day and nights implementing in my group are:
1. Set up a ghost email account so my doers/sellers can copy to update business development activities. We have a CRM system that only marketers can access. We are having a hard time keeping up with and entering all of the BD activities. By setting up this email account and having it sent to me (or another person I delegate to) we can enter/maintain the CRM database without wasting valuable meeting time. The best part about this idea is that I didn’t learn it in one of the sessions, but rather just talking to another marketing manager at breakfast. I would have never thought to do this without conversing with other great marketers! Also, this should be a relatively easy, low cost idea to implement internally and may even spread throughout my firm to other groups. Score!
2. Re-energizing my BD program. In one session, I learned how another BD manager has her doer/sellers develop individual BD plans for the year and uses incentive competitions to motivate them to work toward their plans. This is awesome! She makes everything a competition and FUN! My aha moment was that instead of feeling like I am nagging my folks, I control how fun it can be. When I look at it from this perspective, I can’t wait to get started. This will take a little more effort to implement than the first idea, but I am so excited I am going ensure some type of fun competition is incorporated into our BD system.
3. Direct mail campaign. We have planned to send some sort of direct mail campaign for our market sector this year. In one of the session, we actually worked on our BIG IDEA and I came up with something with another marketer after the session. It was a conversation that started with one idea for the campaign and ended up with something totally different but super awesome! Stay tuned to this blog as I work toward the implementation. All I can say for now is “Choo! Choo!”
These weren’t the only ideas I came away with but the ones that played into my goals for the year and pain points in my current work. I call these the easy wins. The other ideas will be saved in my idea notebook and used for inspiration when implementing other goals or easing other pain.
The next time you attend a workshop, conference or training session think about what your current goals or pain points are. Tune into the sessions that address those and ask questions in the sessions and to the person next to you that aimed at your goals and pain points. Pay attention to the other great ideas, but file them away for later so they don’t distract you.
How do you handle informational overload when attending conferences? Share your tips below in the comments section.
