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So What? Who is doing your Marketing Strategy?

So What? Marketing Analytics and Insights Live

airs every Thursday at 1 pm EST.

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In this week’s episode of So What? we focus on the people doing marketing strategy. We walk through including your people and ways to stay connected. Catch the replay here:

So What? Who is doing your Marketing Strategy?

In this episode you’ll learn: 

  • How to factor people into your plan
  • What to do when you don’t have the resources
  • Why companies fail to think about the people

Upcoming Episodes:

  • CMO Survey Review – 3/10/2022

Have a question or topic you’d like to see us cover? Reach out here: https://www.trustinsights.ai/resources/so-what-the-marketing-analytics-and-insights-show/

AI-Generated Transcript:

Katie Robbert 0:24
Well, hey friends, happy Thursday. Welcome to so what the marketing analytics and insights live show. I’m joined by Chris and John, this week. This week, we’re talking about who is doing your marketing strategy, which sounds like a simple question, but it’s actually more of a complex question, especially when you start thinking about strategies and frameworks and planning and metrics. And when you break all of those down nowhere in that, have you factored in people, maybe you specifically have, but in general, frameworks don’t factor in the people element of it. So we want to start to think about how you can reincorporate that element back into your planning. You know, so we’re going to talk about you know, how to do that what to do when you don’t have the resources, and then just sort of the general mindset of why companies fail to think about the people why it’s an afterthought, afterthought. So I’ll start with the two of you, people. Why do you think I’ll start with you, Chris, why do you think people are an afterthought in planning,

Christopher Penn 1:37
because people are static in the grand scheme of things. When you start up a new campaign, you have new budget, new, creative, new, new a bunch of things, but it’s the people typically don’t change nearly as fast. Now, obviously, the great reshuffling has, you know, changed a lot of that people taking buyout packages and things, you were just on a call with a client, where a bunch of people are leaving the organization. But for the most part, when we think about our marketing, we assume we’ve got the same team have players more or less from campaign to campaign month to month, and so on, and so forth. And so the people kind of become an afterthought, because you just kind of assume they’re always going to be there. And they don’t change all that much. Right. One of the things we’ve noticed with friends with colleagues with clients is that people don’t invest heavily in professional development and training either. Which means that when you think about the people on your team, you don’t think about their evolution as a professional, you just kind of assume that their lack of a better term, a cog in the machine that is there to help you do your marketing.

Katie Robbert 2:44
What about you, John? Yeah, that

John Wall 2:47
is, you know, a lot of people say that’s right at the heart of most of the problems that we have. And not just in business, but in society, as a whole, that we just have this factory mindset, you know, the first and primary concern is executing on the plan, delivering the product getting the campaign done. And yeah, the human factors are just not at the top of the list, or even given any consideration at the beginning, you’re just presuming that your team is going to behave within spec and be able to get all this stuff done. And yeah, unfortunately, it’s short term thinking too. And, you know, it would be far better if you had, you know, a plan for every employee that’s working with you as far as where they’re gonna go and where they end up. But yeah, those are just kind of further along. It’s that’s kind of extra mile work. You know, it’s like everybody wants to at least get the thing done today, and not really think about what’s going to happen next quarter next year. But I think that’s what separates the leaders from the managers.

Katie Robbert 3:41
So I was thinking about this topic a little bit last week, when we were planning the show. And so I started going through some of your more traditional marketing frameworks, you know, you have your SWOT analysis, you have your Porter’s Five Forces, the four P’s of marketing, like name a framework, and, you know, we could talk about it the 60s of data quality, and the people that are factored in, or the audience, and so the audience is important. So, you know, someone might come back and say, No, I factored in the people, it’s the person who’s buying the thing. But we’re still missing the person who’s doing the thing. And so how do we start to solve for that problem? And so again, I’ll start I’ll be asking you guys these questions. What do you think? How do you start to solve the problem of, I’ve put together a marketing strategy that includes, you know, email, and paid ads and organic search, but nowhere in this have I said, Who the heck is going to do this? And the plans already set I’ve got my budget. I don’t have any extra money for hiring. But I never factored in whether or not I have the skill set. So what I do this, you guys say to me, You’re crazy. We got to fix this. How do you even start to fix it?

Christopher Penn 5:00
We fire, you know, there’s the reason, there’s a reason why the term marketing operations has become so popular in the last five years, right? We, we had marketing that digital marketing, then in what 2012 2013 is when we really first started to hear about marketing technology, where marketers were like, Well, hey, we got all this extra stuff that we’re supposed to be doing. And using to do our marketing, and really about, I would say, four or five years ago, is when you first started hearing people talking a lot about marketing operations. So operations management of marketing. And that’s where you do start to hear some of the people come into play, because obviously, part of operations management and operations planning is who’s going to do the thing. Up until then people hadn’t really thought about the people behind running the the marketing operations. But once you start doing traditional operations management, you start looking at more operational frameworks, then yeah, the people are there. But we never really thought about it. Because I mean, think about the evolution of marketing over the last 25 years, went from the arts and crafts department, to being you know, the department that can use artificial intelligence and machine learning and these massive technology systems. And a lot of overhead and baggage, an admin comes with that, because these systems are not as forgiving as you know, just change the the colors on the logo or make the logo bigger. Now, it’s if you don’t operate the system correctly, you might accidentally waste a million dollars in a day Google ads.

Katie Robbert 6:37
I don’t know a lot of personally, a lot of organizations that have a marketing operations person. And the ones that do aren’t thinking about it in terms of resourcing and skill sets. So John, what, you know, what is your thinking on this?

John Wall 6:54
Yeah, you know, for most organizations, I mean, that it starts with the strategic side of it, right? When they’re promising what’s going to be delivered, they’re at least going down the mental list of like, okay, here’s who on the team can do this. And, you know, hopefully, they’re not going to promise stuff that they have no capacity for in the beginning. And then after that, it’s just a classic one on ones, you know, you kind of usually set up something most common is to do once a week to check in with somebody and say, Okay, here’s what we promised, where are you at on these things? And you know, what’s blocking you? What do you need help with and where you’re stuck, and solve all that? I think the only the only improvements I’ve seen in that too, over like the past 20 years is the idea of automating more of that. And there’s some value in anonymous email feedback. You know, we’ve seen some of these systems where, once a week, it sends out, you know, one or two questions in a survey via email, and people can answer anonymously. And that does cut through and get to some of the human problems that people aren’t willing to talk about, or for whatever political reasons might never get surfaced. But yeah, it just seems like the only way to do it is to continue to have regular human contact and review where things are at all the time. So you can at least try and surface problems before it gets too late. You’re not delivering

Christopher Penn 8:07
agencies are the worst about that, where they will go out and they will sell a bunch of things they can’t do, and then go, Hmm, I guess we better go find some contractors to fill this gap. Because we sold that we’re gonna have a CDP. And we don’t even know what that stands for.

Katie Robbert 8:24
You know, I think that that’s exactly what it is people are, let me let me get the thing and then figure it out later, but later comes and then there’s no, there’s nobody to do the job. I was talking with a good friend of mine. And a client that she’s working with, they’ve been trying to hire, or fill the role of a VP of Marketing for over seven months. And they’ve had no candidates for this. And so the company still exists, marketing is still trudging along, but they have no buddy, who’s setting the plan, setting the strategy. And nobody who’s holding the team accountable. But yet, somehow this is all gonna keep moving forward. And so it you know, it’s interesting, John, you brought up the, you know, automation, Chris, you brought up, you know, bringing in a new system, like AI, I think the thing that gets overlooked and again, we’re still just pointing out the problems is that somebody still has to set that up. Somebody still has to maintain it. So if you want to, you know, do an automated email that sends out like one or two questions a week, someone still has to set it up, someone still has to look at it. So you haven’t solved the people problem. If anything, you’ve just, you know, come up with a new idea that somebody has to execute, that there’s nobody there to do it. It’s the same thing with AI. It doesn’t save you time. If there’s nobody there to actually work it work the system.

Christopher Penn 9:48
We managed that problem this week. Right. One of the issues we had an issue yesterday with our email server, right the machine itself had a bunch of technical issues that went wrong all At the same time, and nowhere is it documented this mostly my fault. But no, is it documented that in order for our marketing automation to work, you also need to know how the MySQL database system works, you also need to know how Linux works, you also need to know how to recover transactional database. And you have to know how the inner workings of the the marketing automation software itself. We fortunately have those skills right now in the organization. But because it’s not documented, if I got hit by a bus or something, and this happened again, literally, no one would have any idea how to solve this problem. And so there’s, there’s a lot of dependencies that are tied to people in their skills in an organization that are not documented. And until you lose a person, you don’t realize just how tangled that web is. We were talking with our client the other day about Adobe analytics, and how how badly configured it can be if you’re not using it correctly. And because that’s not as common a skill set as Google Analytics, the people who are in charge of it, in this one instance, can’t make it work as well as it could be working to deliver the results they want. So there’s there are really big issues with what’s trapped inside people’s heads, never making it out of their heads. And then when when you have some kind of change, you know, somebody resigns, it takes a buyout package or mood, you know, decides you’re going to go teach yoga instead, you no longer have that implicit knowledge is gone.

Katie Robbert 11:39
So, John, are you are you on the I’m going to go teach yoga bus?

John Wall 11:43
No, I have experienced with that market. I know how lucrative that really is for yoga instructors. So I yeah, I’m digging the regular paycheck right now.

Katie Robbert 11:55
Well, so you know, you bring up so this is another layer to this problem is the institutional knowledge and whether or not it ever gets documented? And so you could say, well, the easy answer is just to document it. But nobody does it. Because documenting stuff, you know, for a lot of people, it sucks, it’s a time consuming thing. They don’t want to write down how they do it, they may not even know how the thing gets done. And and they may only have a small piece of it. So, you know, I know how I would answer this question. But I want to ask you guys, how do we start to solve for this problem? You know, how do you? How do you start to factor people into your planning?

John Wall 12:39
You know, part of is people. You can engineer out the people, yes, just tossing the people overboard doesn’t solve any of the problems. But it’s Yeah, again, it goes back to this thing of leadership. You know, I mean, if you’re treating your people, right, they’re going to be less likely to bail. You know, and, and as much as it feels good to, you know, have documentation for everything and have it straight. I mean, you still ultimately have to draw the line somewhere. And if you’re doing documentation, you’re working on something that, you know, doesn’t benefit a customer directly today. So you know, to kind of maximize profitability, you have to figure out where that line is of how much stuff gets documented, versus you know, what’s billable. And but yeah, we are reaching this really interesting point where there’s been so many companies that have treated their people so poorly for so long, that they are all willing to pull the trigger and bail. And we’re seeing these places have, you know, challenges that they’ve never faced before? Because yeah, you can bet, you know, the people were already angry. So they were definitely not raising their hand, document, anything, you know, they were considering that part of their job security, which now they’re willingly giving up. So yeah, it just it becomes a human and training issue. I think, you know, starting off with making sure your companies at least say they’re happy and you know, not looking for actively for other positions, that’s at least your first line of defense.

Christopher Penn 14:03
When you think about it, this goes back to the five p framework, right, your your purpose, people process, platform and performance, which when you break it down, you know, the cooking analogy, we always go is what’s on the menu. What’s the recipe? Do you have the ingredients? Do you have the tools? Do you have the chef? Right? And the chef is always in this case, the chef has the issue like Do you have the person who can follow the recipe? If there’s no recipe then anybody can be the chef because he doesn’t matter what you cook. Right? So the question is, do you have the recipe, you know, for what’s on the menu? And if you don’t, how do you get it so that a chef who has some skills can learn it quickly? Right? Some things like making plain pasta pretty easy, right? You can teach pretty much anybody that making a beef Wellington and doing it well that’s a lot harder to do. That’s that’s a tougher recipe. And the challenge with a lot of documentation And internally is, you have to decide, okay, what are the things that are regular? What are the things that are irregular, so documenting, like monthly server maintenance for your marketing servers, that’s something that should be documented because it is a regular thing. And if it, nobody does it, these are the consequences. For example, one of our servers, we have a known issue with a software audit, it will crash after 90 days, like the server will just, boom, stop working. So every 30 days, we do maintenance on it, and it just keeps on humming along fine. That’s a documented known thing is that there’s something written down that says, if we don’t do this, these are the consequences. On the other hand, we have one offs like Oh, yesterday, the InnoDB, log file went out of sync. That doesn’t happen regularly, right. So it’s probably good to make some notes Oh, like, this is what I was working on yesterday. But because the knowledge to cook that exotic dish that only happens once every so often, is so specialized, you may not necessarily even be able to write it down or real, explain what happened. So I would say, from a risk management perspective, getting the recipes down, that have the biggest impact, and that are regulars is probably top of the list.

Katie Robbert 16:12
So you’re both bringing up really good points about the business continuity planning. And so making sure you have those redundancies built in. But in terms of putting a marketing plan together in the first place, where I would start with that is don’t plan in a vacuum. So the number one thing that you can do wrong is have flying all of your really expensive executives to sit around a big conference table and make this plan and then walk away. Well, guess what, none of the people who actually have to do the thing. Were involved in the planning. So they didn’t have a say, they couldn’t tell you, Oh, well, actually, we’ve been doing it this way, or this is what we’ve been doing instead. And so not planning in a vacuum is a great way to start to break down that we don’t know who’s going to do the thing, because what you may find out is we don’t have the skills or resources, or we have a heck of a lot more skills and resources than we thought we had. So the plan that we were putting together as the old overpaid executives is way outdated, and not going to meet the customers where they are. And so getting John, to your point, that employee satisfaction, get people more involved in that planning, having a voice having a say, giving them that sense of ownership over the planning process, and then their peace of it starts to put together like, Okay, who are the resources that we have, who don’t we have, but maybe, you know, we find out that John has really, really been dying to be a Tiktok influencer. And he’s really been focusing on the best practices for creating Tiktok videos. And so we’re like, oh, you know, what, John, why don’t you go ahead and own that piece of the plan? And sort of do some experiments and see what happens when you’re doing, you know, the Carlton shuffle on Tiktok and see if anybody, you know, responds to it and starts to buy stuff from Trust Insights, my guess is probably not. But you never know, because you’ve been studying Tiktok for so long. And I wasn’t aware of it. Because I historically, I just been doing the planning by myself and not asking you guys like, hey, what do you think about this? Do we have the capabilities for this, and so that it does a couple of things, it breaks down that barrier of the, you know, the hierarchy, which quite honestly, is very outdated. Yes, people have their functions and their responsibilities, but that you can only talk to the person who’s at the same level of you are about like, that’s just silly. So get rid of that. And then start, you know, talking with the rest of your team. When you’re building those plans. Don’t plan in a vacuum. What do you guys think of that solution? Good, bad, indifferent?

Christopher Penn 19:00
It goes with sales. Right? You know, one of the things that I think I certainly pride us on as a company is never selling something we can’t do, because we know pretty clearly what is within our wheelhouse and what’s not. The same thing is true for marketing teams, whether or not you work in an agency setting it up, when you commit to do things. If you don’t know the capabilities of your people, it you run into serious issues. And I think one of the things that’s very interesting what you said, Katie, is more on the second side, which is dramatically under estimating what it is that your team can do. If you don’t know what someone’s capabilities are, and they don’t tell you. You you are essentially missing out on revenue. You know, it’s like having a chef is like oh, by the way, I learned how to make sushi like okay, cool. So you know, now you know that this is something you can add to your menu. Now granted, if you’re an Italian steakhouse that may not be exactly the thing to offer the but at least you know that it’s there, maybe you’ll have him open up a food truck at lunchtime outside. If you don’t ever do that skills inventory. You have no idea what the capabilities are when we worked back in our old agency. You know, one of the things that was constantly a challenge for agency leadership was to understand what our team was capable of, they really didn’t know. And as a result, either they oversold or undersold those capabilities. Just because they were they were not in touch. So calving, even if it’s just you’re getting together people for lunch and learns or beers on Fridays and things. That’s at least something.

Katie Robbert 20:45
I agree with that. And I think that it’s interesting, because when we talk about this people problem of, you know, who’s doing the marketing strategy? I think the assumption is you don’t have the resources. But think about it in terms of are you under estimating your resources? I mean, again, maybe John is an amazing Tiktok influencer. And just because we’ve never asked him, we don’t know this. And so John, are you an amazing Tiktok influencer,

John Wall 21:12
I’m doing the Carlton right now, the greatest physical comedian of the 19th 20th and 21st century. It’s, you totally nailed it. And that that is a very strategic thing that you have to keep them on you. You want to align all the strategic factors in your direction, before you go off to that big board meeting with the C level, folks. Because, yeah, if you go into cold into one of those meetings, and one of the other C chairs is like, Hey, what’s going on with this Tiktok thing? Like, you can’t be sitting there saying, I have no idea you want to be there saying, well, we met with everyone last week, and we covered all the new channels. And yet John’s got his Carlton tiktoks ready to drop it, you know, sort of work comes, you know, we’re ahead of it. And then that’s the the key because yeah, and there’s nothing worse than going to the sea level meeting and coming back to the team meeting. And just being like, Okay, here’s the dumpster full of refuse that’s been dropped on us that we now have to do like you at least want to try and get in front of that. And, and even in a best case, you’d be briefing the C. Team about okay, here’s everything that we see going on, this is where we think we should be going, as opposed to letting somebody else define the path for you. But yeah, problems are always the answer. So that’s the

Katie Robbert 22:25
well, and I think that you really hit on, you know, the core point of the conversation is, if you’re planning in a vacuum with people who are out of touch of what the team is capable of your plan is doomed from the start, because then you’re dropping this plan on people who, number one, they don’t have the context for what you were really intending because a lot of plans don’t include some kind of measurement or success measure. To say like, this is how we know the plan worked like so if we say, you know, John, I want you to go get more sales. Your first question is probably like, how much? You know, it’s great question that’s on me to define that. And if I’m not giving you that information, I’m not setting you up for success. I’m not giving you direction on where I want the sales to come from. So if you’re like, great, I just got, you know, five new clients in the healthcare industry. Well, I didn’t want them in the healthcare industry, I wanted them over here. I didn’t tell you that. So I’m not setting up my people for success. So I then don’t have the resources to do the job, because you’ve just gotten a whole bunch of business because you did what I asked. But I didn’t give you enough information to say this is exactly what it is that we need and why. So again, involving the rest of your team in the planning, I think the thing that drives me the most nuts is this idea of these, like behind closed doors meetings, it has to be super secretive, only, you know, higher level people have the capability to think strategically. That’s dumb. So just put that out of your head. That’s just the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. Anybody can contribute to a strategy if you give them the opportunity to do so.

Christopher Penn 24:09
What do you mean, we’re not having a senior leadership retreat?

Katie Robbert 24:13
No, we are absolutely not. I, it’s one of those things. That’s always I’ve always felt like that construct is so backward because the people who are doing the work the quote, unquote, Junior and mid level folks are the ones who are in the weeds, and know the information and the customers the best. And so to then not involve them in those conversations about where do we go from here is such a missed opportunity. And so maybe they’re not responsible for making decisions, but they should be factoring into the conversation of what’s happening. And why. Because they’re the people who have the information.

Christopher Penn 24:56
What if they don’t know?

Katie Robbert 24:58
Then that’s it. conversation to be like, Why don’t you know? What are? What are we as an organization not doing that we can’t get that information? And so it’s I, I always try to position it as it’s not a blame thing. So like, Chris, if I say to you, you know, why aren’t we getting more customers? I don’t know, well, whose job was it? It’s us collectively, as an organization, not setting people up for success to get that information, maybe we don’t have the process. Maybe we don’t have the platform to collect that information. But that’s something that we collectively need to look at.

Christopher Penn 25:37
That that makes sense for an SMB, but we start getting into enterprise where you have, you know, marketing departments of several 100 people, how do you corral that, so that it’s not a 200 person conference call.

Katie Robbert 25:49
So you know, I think that, that comes down to sort again, it’s a hate like that, it’s a top down thing, but setting those expectations of, here’s the kind of information that we need to put the plan together and setting those expectations early. And often, even if they change. So let’s say you have, you know, three different divisions within your marketing team of 100 people. So theoretically, you would then have three different marketing directors, you bring each of those marketing directors together at least once a month to say what’s going on with your team, what’s new, what’s broken, what isn’t working. And it’s that constant communication channel, and making sure that they are partnering versus working against each other. You know, and it gets more complicated. The bigger the teams get, you get to have 1000 person teams, you can have, you know, hundreds of 1000s of people, like a Google, for example, you need to make bringing those people together to talk about what’s going on a priority. Even if it’s once a quarter, somehow there needs to be some sort of a community system a digest something of here’s what’s going on, but you as maybe the person who’s responsible for setting, the course of the company needs to be clear about what is that information that I need to know, in order to do my job, so that I can then set you up for success to do your job? Hundreds of 1000s of people?

John Wall 27:19
Yeah, virtually, there’s human factors on the other side of that, too, right? It’s like the product never stays the same. As far as the amount of value it delivers, you know, it can go up and down and stuff becomes completely obsolete. So you’re always having to respond to that to you know, you can, you can have the same batch of people, you know, be incredibly successful or have a complete, you know, dumpster fire failure all because of, you know, where the what the state of the market is at the time.

Katie Robbert 27:51
So, a lot of companies right now are in this position of they don’t have the resources they can’t hire. For the resources, the resources aren’t available. You know, what do we do there? So we’ve set this plan, we’ve set this strategy, we said, we’re going to do this thing. But now we have literally no one to do the thing. What do we do?

Christopher Penn 28:15
Well, if you have no one to do the thing, you better update your LinkedIn profile, and because your company’s going out of business, but that’s where that inventory of skills comes in handy, right. So again, back to the restaurant analogy, if all you got left as the pastry chef, then you throttle back your menu to the recipes that the pastry chef connects to you down so they can do all the basics, you know, pasta, baked chicken, and stuff like that, and then all the pastries. And you either say, you know, we’re going to have a reduced menu because we have a staffing shortage. Or we say, hey, guess what, we’re a pastry restaurant now. Now, we know we serve pastries, because that’s you work with what you got, but you can’t. It’s something that, you know, my martial arts teacher always says, you know, don’t reach for something that isn’t there. If you have these grandiose marketing plans that rely on somebody, for example, with, you know, connected TV experience, and you don’t have that either in your agencies or in your staff. You can’t realistically do that when you can wing it and try but it’d be like me just saying, oh, you know, I’m just gonna try this whole neurosurgery thing is gonna wing it. How hard can it be? It’s just a scalpel. It’s not going to end it success. So because people are the linchpin of people process and platform. If you don’t have the skills, you don’t have the skills there’s it’s not an inventory anymore. It’s just like, if you don’t have flour, you can’t make a cake. Right. Some kind of flour. If you only have a sand. You’re not making a cake. I don’t care how talented you are. You are you’re not making cake, there was not a cake that anyone’s gonna want to eat.

Katie Robbert 29:46
You’ve clearly not heard of flowerless cakes.

Christopher Penn 29:50
There’s still some kind of edible ingredient there. It’s not sand. No better nappy sand.

Katie Robbert 29:59
I mean, who knows? Sam, what say you, John?

John Wall 30:04
Yeah, it’s, you know, like you said, you just can’t create what’s not there, I think one. One thing that’s changed is that so much of this is been fueled by this great resignation. And people being dissatisfied with the organizational structure at work, that you do have a lot of abilities to outsource stuff. You know, there’s a lot of projects and things. And you can make that case to senior management that like, look, we just can’t do this anymore, because we lost these four people. And so now your choices are, you know, we take the next six months and roll the dice, can we train somebody or hire somebody to fill that? Or do we just want to bite the bullet and throw some cash down now and have a team come in that can get it done within three months, or six months or whatever. So that, you know, it’s not all bad news, there is more opportunity to outsource and try and get things done. But yeah, if you’re going to be hiring, you know, get ready for rough 12 months, I don’t see things getting any easier in the near future.

Katie Robbert 31:02
I would agree with that. So it sounds like the big takeaways of who’s doing your marketing strategy is stay connected with your teams, don’t plan strategies in a vacuum without talking with your teams, because you may be over or under estimating their skill sets. And then make sure that you’re checking in maybe quarterly to do that skill set inventory to say, you know, have you learned something new? You know, have you taken your Tiktok knowledge and applied it to Snapchat? Or is there something else that you’re starting to explore, that we aren’t even aware of that we could start doing experiments on? And so really, the bottom line is, keep talking to your people keep checking in with them, making sure that they’re happy with what they’re doing, if they’re eager to do other things? What are those things? How does it factor into the work that you currently do. And then don’t be afraid of bringing on contractors, sort of that stop gap for a while you’re trying to hire someone full time, you may find out that the contractors that you have are doing the job. But I guess just don’t forget that at the end of the day, whether it’s a new AI piece of software that you think is going to automate, everything that you’re doing, someone still has to set that up. If it’s, you know, bringing on a team, someone still has to hire and train that team. If you’re, you know, doing buyouts for people, because you need to cut back, you still need those transition plans and documentation of what the heck it is they do. Those are just realities that you cannot get around. Technology will not solve those problems for you.

Christopher Penn 32:48
And the big thing with people and this goes back to the five d framework is purpose isn’t just organizational, either it is person level, if you don’t know what motivates the people on your team, you’re going to lose them as weight because you’re going to try and solve things for the wrong problem with the wrong solution. If somebody is really adamant, like their purpose is all about social good. And you know, you say we’re gonna put a foosball table in the break room. Well, guess what, that’s not going to motivate that person in the slightest. You can only understand that through your detailed conversations with with the people on your team. And you have to be willing to listen to those answers and even to ask those questions that can be uncomfortable questions.

John Wall 33:38
Yeah, what they don’t be afraid to have fun with part of that, too. You can say to your team, look, you know, give two hours a week or something to work on something that’s just way out outside of the normal things going on. And it’s fine to have them report back to you like once a month, do a lunch and learn where people come in and just talk about Yeah, you know, look how good my Tiktok yoga videos are doing. You know, you can share that and people can start to get ideas and video encourage people to play around outside of just what they’re doing for their job every day.

Katie Robbert 34:07
I wholeheartedly agree with that. And I look forward to seeing your Tiktok yoga videos John,

John Wall 34:11
Tyler Carlton man, that’s gonna be the Carlton, Carlton yoga. Wow.

Katie Robbert 34:21
Any thoughts?

John Wall 34:24
Yeah, it’s hard. Yeah. I threw the Carlton down too early, who should have been rolling out on the Carlton. I think

Christopher Penn 34:33
that’s a good place to say we’ll talk to you next week. Thanks. Thanks for watching today. Be sure to subscribe to our show wherever you’re watching it. For more resources. And to learn more. Check out the Trust Insights podcast at trust insights.ai/t AI podcast and a weekly email newsletter at trust insights.ai/newsletter Got questions about what you saw in today’s Episode join our free analytics for markers slack group at trust insights.ai/analytics for marketers See you next time

Transcribed by https://otter.ai


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