The Monkey and The Marketer

This post is dedicated to my dear colleague Abi Stern, with thanks for the discussion that inspired it...
One of the major battles for many marketers is finding enough time for high value activities amongst the sea of humdrum day to day duties, often in support of other business functions and away from their core focus.

We affectionately term this "monkey work"; its not difficult, just time consuming. This is also an affectionate nod to Ken Blanchard's book The One Minute Manager Meets The Monkey, which is ace if you haven't read it. So how do we ensure our monkey time is managed and we have enough hours left to be marketers?

1) Make sure you know who else could perform the task - sure, as a marketer you're a master at your CRM system but does that mean you're the only one with access? Your automatic adoption of tasks without asking who should really do them and whether the responsibility could be shared will lead to too much monkey business and not enough marketing.



2) Make a habit of saying no or not now occasionally - if you allocate certain blocks of time in which you can complete these tasks and stick to them, you'll naturally push back on people's so called "urgent" requests and you'll be amazed how many turn out not to be urgent or how easily the person finds another way to do whatever it is they wanted you to do.



3) Be sure to understand the purpose of the activity - I've been asked to analyse different things in our business more times than I care to count and often when I ask what the information will be used for I get a pretty lame "oh, I just thought it'd be interesting to know". So ask the question, because prioritising other people's idle curiosity is unlikely to be your smartest move.

 Anyone got any other tips they'd like to share?

3 ways to decide if a good idea isn't good enough

I came across a great post on HBR the other day focusing on killing off good ideas in order to concentrate your resources on a few that then come to fruition. I really liked this as an approach, perhaps because marketers are so often in a position of being idea rich and time poor, often inadvertently positioning themselves as ineffective as a result. (You've all worked with people like that - super creative types who never complete a project because they've got all wrapped up and excited by their next big idea).

So how do we decide which ideas to keep and throw our weight behind and those to let fall by the wayside?

Before I throw in my 2 pence worth, I want to make it clear that I know there are hundreds of possible ways of doing this and these are just my own, another opinion on the pile!

1) Does the idea align with your strategic objectives? Ideally all major projects should support the pillars of your annual strategy and move those lofty strategic aims forward towards a reality.
2) Can we put a dollar value on the benefit of executing the idea? I'm not saying that if we can't we shouldn't pursue it but I'd rather we could, as no idea that fits into this mould can really be a nice to have if the bottom line impact is significant.
3) Who would your team be? Again, you don't always want to avoid pursuing ideas that involve working with people who are likely to let you down and make your life more difficult. Sometimes it is unavoidable; yet I'd allow it to rule things out if confronted with a list of things with similar possible levels of benefit to the business.

It's ok to be grey

This morning we received the tragic news of a colleague's sudden passing away, so I wanted to post the most valuable lesson he taught me as a memorial and tribute to someone for whom I had great respect.

The gist of the lesson: data doesn't have to yield concrete conclusions to be useful

I used to live in a world where data proved things one way or the other. If the results were inconclusive there was inaction.

Since then I have been able to observe how the grey areas often reveal more subtle nuances of an issue, suggest contributions to situations or issues, may present opportunities or challenges that a person just looking for black and white might ignore.

So next time you are analysing something and there are no immediately obvious conclusions, don't get frustrated - look a little closer, you never know what you might see.

How much is enough?

Ever asked yourself "Am I spending enough time on this?" Or too much?

An easy way to find out is to work out:

1) What do I expect to achieve? The simple act of goal setting will give you an accurate picture of the relative scale and importance of the task or project compared to others in your remit.

2) Time evaluation: We are looking to assess value out vs effort in; the simplest way to do this quickly is to work out how many hours you have in total. Then assess what percentage of your time will have to be expended to achieve the result.

Ideally the time % should be lower than the result % but equal is fine too. Pursuing more than the occasional effort where the % goes the other way is a quick route to late nights and under productivity.

"Edge Work" and drawing satisfaction from incremental change

Yesterday I was introduced to the concept of edge work, the idea that we work away at the edges of an issue and gradually, over time, effect significant change. There was only one problem with this concept as far as I can see, that is the marketer who introduced this idea to me clearly has far more patience and zen-like abilities than I do.

So, how do impatient people who want everything done right about yesterday in one big glorious change revolution derive satisfaction from this inching almost imperceptibly closer to the goal?

I talked to a friend about it later in the evening and they came up with a very unlikely answer. WeightWatchers.

Huh? How is a weight loss programme going to teach me to be satisfied with moving at the pace of a heavily tranquilised snail? Her answer was this:

At WeightWatchers they ask you not to try and weigh yourself every day, but to wait for the weekly group weigh-ins. The reason for this is that your weight fluctuates daily even though it is ultimately on a downward trajectory. If you look every day you see ups and downs and get demotivated with the whole effort.

By monitoring your progress over a longer period, you see it for what it really is. Progress in the right direction. To help me understand she showed me her week to week chart; the line wasn't straight (in fact sometimes it was pretty flat and sometimes moving significantly downwards) but the direction was clear.

So there you have it; set a goal, set sensible increments to check your progress against it and board the train for zen-like patience and deep satisfaction in what you have acheived. (I'll let you know how it goes!)