Managing, Time, Projects, and Your Marketing Calendar Featuring Dean Jackson and Joe Polish - I Love Marketing Episode #435

In most businesses, there's a real sort of cyclical nature to things that go with the seasons or go with the times of year and knowing ahead of time what's the optimal time to start promoting certain things or planning ahead of time?

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Dean Jackson and Joe Polish.

You spend a lot of time thinking about time, about rituals, about routines, about creating friction free sort of environments and activities. And so, you know, all of that sort of ties into, you know, if an entrepreneur is sitting there thinking, okay, you know, I did a lot of things this year, some of it worked, some of it didn't work. Some people, you know, are really overwhelmed and busy and don't know how to prioritize and make decisions. And other people are not. I think most people are that are business owners. However, how do you think about a marketing calendar and how do you think about time?

In most businesses, there's a real sort of cyclical nature to things that go with the seasons or go with the times of year. And knowing ahead of time, what's the optimal time to start promoting certain things or planning ahead of time so that you're, you're there. There's always things that you could plan around if you took the time to kind of lay out the calendar and look at what, what's going to happen and make up your ideal timelines. A lot of times what happens with business owners is they get so busy just doing the work within the business that these things kind of sneak up on them. And it's, you know, February 1st and all of a sudden they start thinking, boy, we should really do something for Valentine's Day. And then it's almost too late to really, you know, get that momentum going.

Marketing and selling is, is rarely an event, it's a process. And if you don't plan that process out and you do it very episodically, you're going to run into situations where, oh, I kind of could have done that. You know, there's many people that had they started thinking about a holiday promotion during Christmas or Thanksgiving, they could have really capitalized on it in a great way. I mean, many businesses, you know, they operate on this, in many ways fascinating launch day called Black Friday, where they just prepare all of these sales activities usually built around price discounting. And you know, it's just, it's kind of funny, but, you know, there's a lot to be said about planning things out. And if you don't do it, you know, the whole cliche everyone's heard a million times, if you fail to plan, plan to fail sort of thing. One thing that people should put down on their marketing calendar is also if you really want to work with someone, then build it into your schedule. I mean, if you want to develop a joint venture, if you want to launch a new product line, a new campaign, you, it will not happen by itself. And there, you know, I don't know about you, Dean, but I am a big believer in seeing things that are visual. I mean, my team uses electronic calendars. We have a lot of different electronic tools. I'm a huge fan though of seeing something on a wall. Whoever is the main person that's planning marketing campaigns, if you're working out of your house, I still think you'd be well served to have, you know, some visual thing up on a wall that you can just look at and you can just sit there and think because it's, it's, you know, planning things out is really thinking time. And I think being on a computer is distracting. What is the best way to plan? I mean, this sounds like the most basic sort of question, but how, how do you think about planning?

You and I both have unlimited ideas for projects for things to do, unlimited opportunities presented to us, but other people, opportunities that they want us to work on with them and stuff on our own. So there's all kinds of things. And so really what I do is just like what I explain in the, in the 50 minute Focus Finder video is I'll sit down for 50 minutes and I will write an exhaustive list of every project I can think of, everything that I've got on my mind, you know, whether I'm going to, whether I'm doing it right now actively or not. It's holding a space in my mind. And so I will go through and I'll get that list. Not so much, you know, in the very beginning, like the first 10 minutes of doing that, that 50 minute focus finder, what you end up with are the things that are tasks that are on your mind that you've got to, things you need to do right now. And then as you sort of get those tasks out of your brain, you have an opportunity to kind of think through what are the projects that I've got? The, not the tasks that I've got to do right now, but the open, open projects that I've got. So, you know, if I look at it, so even just with the things that, that you and I have would be, you know, that I love. Marketing is a, is a, a project context. You know, what Dave David Allen would call a context? You've got that as a project. These are things that, not necessarily that we're going to do anything right this minute about them, but they're things that are, that are on your mind, all the possible things that you could do, whether, whether you're going to do them or not. Now honestly, when I do this too, I've got projects that have been on my list for a long time that I, that I yet to do anything with, but they're there as a, as a potential product or project. So what I look at then when I get that list done, here's how I kind of evaluate them. I know that you can't do them all now. And I ask myself, is this going to be a good idea in 12 months from now? Is this going to be a good idea in two years from now? Like, is it an idea that is, you know, only valuable right now because it's timely and topical? Like, is there a timeline on it? Or is it something that's going to be a perennial that will have, you know, long term reaching value and sometimes that, you know, I look at it and say, so I don't feel like I need to do anything about it right this second, you know, because you get so. The most terrible position to be in, mentally, it's draining is to be in a position where every project has equal weight and you're not, you know, moving forward on any of them. You know, where you get all these projects where you've got so many things and it's hard to really kind of make a decision on which one is the one that you need to, to dedicate your time to. It helps you get clarity on which projects are the ones that will be the most valuable investment of your limited time. I came up with the, with the COD model of project management. Okay, so C is, is collect. That's like collect all of the, all those projects that I could work on, you know, get into collecting is about getting all of that together, all of the materials, all the things that you could possibly do, whether you're ever gonna do it or not. If you, if you've got the idea for it, write it down, you know, collect it, gather it all in one place. And it's like the whole. The only way that your mind can be free to focus on the thing that you have determined is the most important thing that you could be working on is to be absolutely confident that there's nothing that you're forget that could be more important. So it requires that you go through that collection process to get all of the all the possible projects that you can work on out onto paper or out into your planning system. So the C is for collect, the O is for organize. And that is where a project management tool set up the projects and I set up the benchmarks or due dates or you know, special events or things that need to be scheduled on the calendar. So that leads to the D in the COD project management method, which is, I called it dispatch or distribute the the products, the project, the tasks, the accountabilities, the deliverables you're dispatching on or distributing, who's going to do what and when. And that is a. That's kind of the way that when I put those tickets on my, on my focus board in the evil Scheme hatchery, that's what I'm doing is organizing after organizing those projects so I know which ones need to be done first. I'm dispatching them to whoever needs to do. I think that a, a great thing to now and the end of the year is to do is to schedule and complete four 50 minute focus finder sessions. And I'm going to share with you what those four. What I would recommend for you is number one is to do a 50 minute focus finder on your before unit on everything that you do could do the projects that you know from listening to the I Love Marketing podcast, things that you had notes that you would like to implement, get all of that out. Just spend 50 minutes focused and getting all of your thoughts about your before unit out onto paper, collecting all of your thoughts about the before unit. Then do the same thing for your during unit. Go through and look at your current customer experience timeline so that when you're looking at it, what are all the things that are reality now, the things that you're actually doing and delivering and then looking at the ideal of what you could do, the things that you know that you could do. You know, by the way, one of the greatest books that you can read when you start thinking about your during unit is the Ken Blanchard book Raving Fans. You know, it's an easy book to read and just reading it and going through it and creating a little narrative that describes the experience that you want your clients to have when they go through. When they go through your your process or they come into your environment or they go through a transactional process with you. All of that stuff. Look for the, the things that you could do in your during unit that would have the big, the biggest impact and then the same thing in your after unit. You know, the things that you can do to communicate with the people who know you, like you and trust you so that you can nurture lifetime relationships with the ones that you're already in relationship with and orchestrate referrals so that they introduce you to people who you don't know, who they know, you know, people to orchestrate those referrals for you. That's a great a, that's a great thing to focus on in your after unit. So if you spend, you know, a 50 minute focus finder on each of those three, then the fourth would be what I call your me unit. You know, the dean unit or the Joe unit. You know, because we talk about the before unit, the during unit, the after unit and the me unit is the things that are going to make your life better, the things that are things that you could do, like focusing on getting more sleep. What could you do to your sleep environment that would improve the level of comfort that you have? You know, is it time for you to get a new bed? I've switched a few years ago to the Tempur Pedic mattress and you know, now I've got one in every room. Basically we've got them in, in both of our houses and in my, both of my offices. And they're just such great things that add a wonderful experience to my sleep. And, you know, what kinds of things could you do to improve your sleep or to make your life better? You know, your life starts to get pretty cool, you know, because you really can have an incredible experience when you start going down the path of lifestyle design.

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