You know those good intentions you have about how you are going to build your business? You're going to stay in touch with clients and follow up with prospects, or you're going to write that white paper, or even that book.
Riiight! You probably look these intentions and recognize an old friend (or an old enemy!). You see things that you have resolved to tackle again and again. You may have even started to work on one of these intentions a few times, only to have it fall by the wayside. The bottom line is that you have never pulled it off.
What do you do? If you're like most of us, you kind of grit your teeth, put your shoulder to the wheel, hunker down and ... you get the idea, choose whatever metaphor you like, but you vow to be more disciplined, and you call on "more willpower" to resolve the issue.
How is that working for you so far?
Play Dirty
If you are like most of us, your first strategy for finally getting more marketing done is to overpower it. You're just going to be tougher than your own resistance or distraction or whatever you think is holding you back.
Now, if one of your clients proposed repeating a strategy that had failed time again, by just "trying harder," you'd immediately point out the problems with that approach. But we are not nearly so objective and rational about our own businesses.
Instead of somehow overwhelming your resistance, chip off a piece of the action or intention in question, and trick yourself into doing it. Rearrange your environment to keep that little piece visible, and make it small enough that you don't run and hide.
For example, suppose your big intention is to "follow up with prospects regularly." This often is not appealing, and the thought of making one call after another to follow up on your last contact or the white paper you sent them is just depressing.
Change that intention to "call X," where X is a specific person, just one person on your list. Then put X's name in several places in your environment: sticky note on your bathroom mirror, contact information in the middle of your desk every morning, have your laptop or your smart phone power up with that contact information on top. When you make that call, create a new intention, to "call Y."
If you need to learn more about marketing, or about the industry you serve, but never find time to read up on it, turn a blog about the subject into your home page on your browser. If you need to write an article, or a white paper or something larger, put an index card on top of each file you use, or on your desk, or even in the pocket where you keep your phone. Make your new intention to write one bullet point reflecting a key concept in the article on that card, sometime during the day. Next day write another one.
Basically, imagine how you would trick someone else into inching forward on one of these good intentions, and then apply all that sneakiness to your own marketing efforts. A year from now, instead of the same stagnant list of good intentions, and another failure of "will power and discipline," you'll have some actions that are well on their way to being implemented regularly.
And, of course, you'll have more business.
P.S. There is a lot of research on the notion that will power and decision making are limited resources that we can easily deplete during the day. For an easy introduction to this topic, this recent article is a good place to start.
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