Am I doing the right thing the wrong way?
Am I doing the right thing the wrong way?
That idea came to me from three different stories within 24h.
1) Whilst going over last year's Spryng clips, I heard Fran Langham from Cognism talk about how this was one thing she took away from the conference.
Here’s what she said:
"Everyone says you need to understand your customers deeply.
But sometimes we are not doing it in the right way. We use Wynter. And we love it.
But we are not totally mindful of the questions we ask. One talk really got me thinking about what type of questions we should ask.
We don't need to get answers to 20-30 questions.
If we ask 2-3 questions in the right way, we can get much richer answers, and probably it will influence our messaging in a much better way. "
2) Then, I saw a tweet from Gaetano saying:
"CMO goal is something like increase marketing contribution to revenue by X%.
Meanwhile, marketers are worried about how many new pages are being shipped.
There’s a huge disconnect.
5 pages might be all you need to hit that top-line goal.
One campaign might be the thing that gives you massive uplift.
A homepage redo could do it.
Fixing a broken part of the sales process could do it.
I am finding that teams have big top-line goals, but the activities don’t align with a results mindset.
It aligns with a volume of activities mindset."
3) Lastly, this from Viktoria Sakal:
"We're so busy executing against our quarterly plans and our weekly to-dos that we've become obsessed with:
process, not progress;
movement, not leverage;
quick answers, not better questions.
But if we consider the 80/20 rule, asking more, better questions - exploring more potential growth opportunities - will actually increase our odds of surfacing smarter, higher impact strategies."
Very often, there’s an opportunity to achieve more by doing less.
But in the culture of speed, processes, incentive misalignments, and plain stupidity, we forget to take a step back and think about what we are doing and why.
The questions we ask. The assumptions we have.
The best ways to achieve bottom-line goals. The leverage we could have.
Truth, research, and pondering are uncomfortable and not rewarded.
We get caught up in existing processes and measure vanity progress. The volume and activity. Not real progress.
Instead, it pays off to be a little skeptical and question everything.
What do we want to achieve? Why?
Are we doing the right thing to achieve it?
Is this the best way to do it?
Is there a better way? A different way? What are all the other ways?
What would have to be true to get 10x more results?
Are the things really the way we think they are?
What’s really working for us? What isn’t working?
Are we doing this thing this way because we’ve always done it this way?
Could we achieve it in a 10x more effective way?
Are these the right questions to ask? – see, I’m questioning myself.
Validate assumptions. Question everything. Dig deep.