Greg's Right FIT #413

Quick notes to help you grow your business in less time with less effort. . . sometime next week. 

In this issue: 

- Thoughts on Patience
- Being Human
- Random Stuff

Thoughts on Patience

• It takes time to build your momentum muscles. It's not just physical muscles, it's mental muscles too. Give yourself time and be patient with results. 
• Time and repetition work together to make an effective salesperson. Recognizing a situation and reacting appropriately comes with time. 
• A momentum mindset demands that we take action, but be patient with results. Developing new clients relies on any number of events and decisions taking place. Momentum tells us to believe in action, but match it with patience.
• Speaking of patience, successful living comes not so much from lightning bolt moments of luck but more from little edges gained from every day activity. Stay active. 

Being Human - Lead generation's feedback loop

"True intuitive expertise is learned from prolonged experience with good feedback on mistakes.” – Daniel Kahneman

If you're engaged in lead generation work for a sales team, you know the key component of effective campaigns is feedback. Measuring whether a lead closes or doesn't, or whether it's good or bad is a start, but we're most interested in finding the reason each of those outcomes happened. Even better if the reasoning is limited to numerous anecdotes.

What I am bumping into is lead generation vendors who are not used to getting much feedback. Instead of getting better at feedback, they are trying to build complicated ROI models to justify their effectiveness. This is especially true when a controller or CFO gets involved in determining if a budget or contract is renewed. If the sales team isn't giving detailed feedback on leads, or if the communications between the sales team and the leads aren't being recorded/reviewed, we're left guessing or making assumptions. And you know what they say about assumptions. 

What can we do to improve this situation? Better questions and open communication. 

• Marketers getting feedback need a lot of data points to avoid falling into the trap of The Law of Small Numbers. Often, the marketers or vendors are so starved for information that one piece of feedback skews activity. Be patient. Collect a lot of feedback and review all available communications between sellers and prospects.
• Sales teams giving feedback tend to overthink responses, trying to guess what the marketer is looking for. Or worse, they don't want to get in trouble and hold back on information. The problem here is no one knows what they are looking for from any one transaction. It's seeing trends in volumes of information that make a difference. Be open and honest, you're after the same goal.
• Lastly, quotas hang over both sides of the conversation, making communication harder. Sales people need to make sales, and marketers need to justify their spends. Both are working on tight timelines. Good lead generation takes time. Recognizing this up front helps. 

With these challenges, it's no wonder we see such an emphasis on tactics. As one client said, "Greg, what do you think of the plan?" It's fine. The plan is fine. It's always good. The adjustments are what is going to make or break the campaign, not the initial plan. The feedback is what leads to adjustments.

My advice is to spend as much time on improving feedback as defining tactics. In the end, it's your feedback loop that will determine the plan/campaign's success. 

Random Stuff

"A wise man speaks because he has something to say, a fool speaks because he has to say something.”–Plato

Do you listen to audiobooks? I reserve them for roadtrips, but rumor has it that some of my friends listen to them as they workout or drive around town. This led me to ask my publisher about getting audiobooks made from my titles, which led to them saying, "go for it." 

So I'm making an audiobook or two. 

Naturally, the first thing I do is look through my list of audiobooks, trying to remember which ones I like best and why. I prefer hearing the author speak for an autobiography or similar book, but for fiction I like professional narrators. The guy that reads the Jack Reacher books especially. Even at 2X he's easy to understand. 

Next I looked at how long this is going to take. It looks like the pros estimate 4-6X the length of the final product is spent making it. This book should be around 5 hours to read, so 20-30 hours. Hmm.  

Then I look up what to do about the numerous graphics I explain in the book. And what about some nice little musical interludes between sections or chapters? 

This leads me to a robot voice tool. What if I train an AI voice tool to read the book for me? Will that save me some time and still be listenable? I mean, will anyone listen anyway? 

Well, one thing I know is it won't be happening today. Last night I went out with friends, watched some basketball, and I'm a little froggy this morning. No one wants to listen to this voice. I guess that's another thing to consider. Vocal consistency. Like the pros. 

Speaking of pros, the guy who read my novel "The Legend of Mad Gringo," was great. I didn't even recognize what I wrote. It was that good. You can listen to it yourself here. (I have some promo codes if you want to go all in. . .just let me know!)

I'll keep you posted on my audio progress. It'll happen. Someday.