If today you have spent more time checking news sites and social media rather than doing your work, that’s ok. If you have been distracted, if you have struggled to focus, if you now feel you have achieved nothing, that’s ok. If the last minute meeting felt like just too much to take, that’s ok.
If your boss or somebody else has not extended their full support, empathy, and understanding, that is not ok.
Take your time. Breathe.
We’ve got this.
Keep in mind that some tools that we use daily in marketing (and not only) are just ideas that stuck.
As such, it is good to periodically review them to make sure that they are still useful and that people using them agree on what they are for.
The funnel is such an idea.
Everybody uses it and talks about it all the time. Yet even within the same organisation, it is usual to have different people look at it from different angles, defining different stages in different ways, and generally using the levers for somewhat contrasting purposes.
So, asking what a visitor is, what a lead is, what qualification means, and agreeing on the process that moves traffic back and forth is a great place for teams to start. And to go back to whenever it makes sense.
Without this conversation, chances are that you are all focusing on separate parts. And that’s not how the funnel gets going.
The real edge in today’s world is not to have all the answers, but to motivate people to invest their resources – time, energy, money, attention – to find the answers. Possibly working with others.
We all heard that the world is more complex than ever, more ever-changing than ever, more fast-paced than ever. Yet we fail to understand what that means. Most of us are not asked to draw from their previous expertise to come up with ready-made solutions. Quite the contrary, the more you can tame the knowledge and information you have, sit with a problem, ask around, collect ideas, prepare the setting, coach people, lead the execution, the more you will be relevant.
We don’t need actions. What we need is systems.
Success is never binary. And very rarely you land on a 0 or on a 1.
Most often, you find yourself somewhere in between.
Understand this to appreciate the progress you have made, as well as the path you still have ahead of you.
If you navigate the internet in search of answers and all you get is confusion and frustration, you are not any different from most of us.
And it is not that people are mean and they don’t want to let you in their own secret.
The point is that there is no secret.
There are probably hundreds of roads to get where you are going. Some of them seem similar, some are very different, some contradict each other. Some are cryptic, some are clear, some seem to go in completely different direction but are actually the two sides of a same coin.
It’s easy to get lost on roads that others have built for themselves.
That’s when you understand that the only road that matters is the one you choose to take. Every day.
You've got this 