Informed agility
It’s easy to slip into complacency when we’ve been in the marketing business for a while; we’ve earned our stripes, we’ve seen it all, and we’ve pulled off a number of minor miracles in our career. And yes, that’s a record to be proud of; but now we’re dealing with an industry that is evolving at warp speed.
We have to be agile to continue to adapt while maintaining quality and value in what we do. Competition is fierce, we all know that, and our clients are also continually looking for that edge to help them win new work. The reality of our marketplace is that we’ll need to help our clients accomplish what they need to, and we all have to do that with fewer resources and in markedly less time.
Keeping up with changes requires informed agility from us. How often are decisions made based on a gut sense or because traditionally “that’s how we’ve always done it”? More than ever we need to make decisions based on data, not on guesses.
On the marketing side there are a lot of database tools available to us to help track our activities, the level of effort we have to put out, and the results of our efforts. We also have an obligation to keep our C-Suite team informed of changes as we seen them happening; a surge in activities in a specific geography, a poor hit rate relative to a service, growth or reduction in backlog for a market sector.
It’s amazing how often data actually contradicts our experience and assumptions; so informed agility and decision-making is critical to the economic performance and viability of the firms that we work for!
