6 Principles of Selling In Your Project

You have an idea!

You’ve thought it through, and you’re excited. You’ve uncovered something that’s really going to help your company or your boss or your client achieve their goals. You want your project to get attention and action. It deserves it, right?

Wrong.

Having an idea, unfortunately, doesn’t in itself entitle us to see it to fruition. Instead, in a business context, we must first translate that idea and present the case for it. Selling in your project requires a few key elements to ensure that it gets proper consideration.

1. Hypothesis

This seems obvious, but is rarely done well. The hypothesis behind your idea should illustrate why your idea is valuable (i.e. what problem you’re trying to solve), a rough sketch of how you hope to get there, both the potential upsides and downsides, and some conclusions you’ve drawn about possible results based on other people’s experiences, your research, assumptions, and data. It’s the underpinnings of an initial plan.

Try something like “I’d like to propose we try X because I think it can help us improve Y. My initial plans would include doing A, B, and C in order to lay the groundwork. Our potential obstacles include D, E and F and we’ll need to consider those in our plans. If we’re successful, based on my research to date, I believe we can achieve Z.”

The more clearly you state your hypothesis, the more likely you are to get and keep someone’s attention.

2. Allies

Cause you gotta have frieeeeenddss…. No, really. It’s very hard to fight a battle much less wage a war (even a well-meaning one) all by your lonesome. Building alliances requires coming prepared to share why you think your project or idea is worthwhile, and illustrating how you’d like that person to help you in your quest. Presenting a united front can help lend credibility to a project, as it demonstrates that it’s not just a solitary whim, but an idea that has backing from more than one mind.

3. The Opposition

Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer, even when you’re building a project plan. You need the naysayers to lend perspective, as well as demonstrate that you are considering all sides of the equation in your planning, including the not-so-pretty ones.

I’m not suggesting you indulge a jerk that can’t offer a constructive perspective, but I am saying that you need to present the concerns, challenges, or issues that are raised by those who are skeptical of your plan, if they’re out there. It’s doing your due diligence, and can give you a much needed reality check when you’re passionate about something.

4. Translation

If you’re selling  a marketing project into the C-suite, you’ll need to talk in terms of how it will impact brand reputation, awareness, lead generation. If it’s a research project, you’ll need to speak in terms of the insights you hope to collect, and what they’ll help you improve or address in your business. If you’re selling a project into  your team, you’ll need to help them understand how it will change their priorities, roles, and how you’ll equip them to do it.

It’s absolutely critical to put the project not in terms of how you see it, but in a frame of reference that’s relevant to the person you’re trying to convince.

5. Negotiation

We never win out of the gate. Okay, rarely. Slam dunks are the stuff of legend.

When you have a project plan in hand, come prepared to negotiate. Much like buying a car or selling a house, you know your ideal price, but you also know what you’ll accept. The great negotiators always come to the table to pitch the perfect vision, but prepared to walk away with a step in that direction. That requires a dose of humility – accepting that all of your solutions aren’t brilliant or perfect – and the patience to recognize that some progress is better than fierce and utter resistance.

6. Accountability

Want to win the trust of your colleagues for this and future projects?

Own your part in it. That means sharing the credit for successes – after all you didn’t do it yourself – and being willing to look in the mirror when it comes to assessing what might have gone wrong. It’s also important to have the skills to look at the failures clinically rather than emotionally, so that you can diagnose where the hiccups might have been without making them someone’s personal responsibility.

And when you’ve captured learnings – whether the happy ones or the challenging ones – share them. Liberally. Report back to the boss or the team and chronicle what you learned. Communicate often and openly so that folks know how invested you are not just in the project, but in the results.

What’s Your Principle?

I know you’re out there, those of you who have successfully sold in projects, or struggled to do so. I know you’ve learned in the trenches, and gotten it wrong before you got it right (where do you think this post idea came from?).

I’d love to hear more from you about what principles you have as part of your project pitch, and the questions you have for those that have done it successfully.

The comments are yours.

image credit: walknboston

Social Media Needs Accountability

We’ve talked a lot here in the last few months about some of the nuts and bolts of social media strategy and execution.

Stuff like time management and goal setting and measurement.

But the real key to getting social media established in your organization isn’t just having the toolbelt of skills and tactics and ideas. You need to be accountable what you deliver, other than just a vision and crossed fingers.

Objectives and Strategy

If you don’t know what constitutes a measurable objective, it’s time to learn. And if your social media strategy is lacking, buckle down and make it better.  If you want your social media efforts to be taken seriously , treat them as such. Approach them as you would any other business endeavor that requires investment of time, intellect, and resources.

Shortchange the planning piece, and you’re just tinkering. And good luck getting the boss or the board or the client to take you seriously.

Practical Measurement

Please stop telling me you can’t measure social media. Yes you can. You can measure it as well as we’ve ever been able to measure things that impact the sales channel but are not the sales channel themselves. Communications. Customer service. Business Development. Public relations. Marketing. Infrastructure impact. Cost savings. There are plenty of old ideas that are still applicable, and plenty of new things to try.

Lots of social media measurements are going to be correlative vs. causal. Meaning you’ll be able to show that your social media efforts align with progress toward other goals, but that you won’t usually be able to prove that social media is the only thing that drove that progress. But so too with any of the other things I mentioned. That’s the nature of business infrastructure. It’s all related and interdependent.

The problem is that this requires systems thinking, and dedicated work, and too many folks are stopping at the “this is hard and I don’t know how so I’m going to blame the medium”.  But no one said you had to nail it perfectly out of the gate. Get in and get your hands dirty, and learn.

Behavior (and Consequences)

What you put on the internet stays on the internet. Do we really need more reminders of that? If you’re representing your company, your personal self, or a balance of both, it’s not social media’s fault if you screw that up. It’s yours.

The instantaneous nature of online communication means it’s far too easy to leave your filters at the door and just pop off about whatever’s on your noggin. But there are real people and businesses at the other end of your communications. And that goes for you as an individual, and you as a business. Just because you can put it out there in real time doesn’t mean you should. Good judgment is needed as much now as ever. Maybe more.

Rushing headlong into social media without any consideration for the culture, investment, risks, cost of success (yes, that’s real), resources, and other business implications is just plain silly. The web will still be here in a few months while you get your ducks in a row, okay?

Responsibility for Outcomes

It’s wonderful to be innovative. Creative. Experiment. I’m a huge proponent for those things, and always have been.

But that means you’ve got to own the results of your work, even if they’re not what you’d hoped for. It’s easy to own success. It takes courage and solid footing to own the “learning opportunities” that come with missing the mark. I’m not talking always about taking the personal blame (though sometimes that’s appropriate), but first owning up to mistakes or shortfalls, then the most important bit:

Making a commitment to do something about them.

Learning and Adjustment

Listening isn’t enough. Engaging isn’t enough. Measuring isn’t enough. You don’t win a prize for doing any of those things alone.

The entire point of all of this stuff is to absorb, learn, and glean insights about how to make your business better for both you and your customers. Listening begets engagement in order to shape information and experiences. Measuring helps you see how well you’re doing with either. But the real gold is a part that only a human can do, and in the part that’ll be unique to each business: figuring out how what you hear, say, and measure has an impact on your entire business. Not just the social media part.

That might require something as old-fashioned as a meeting, or a discussion. Some analysis and critical thinking, or getting help with that piece. That might require talking to people in other departments that you’ve never met. It might mean having a tough conversation with your boss to kill a poor performing initiative, or stick with a new one that’s not there yet, but shows promise.

A Court of Our Peers?

I happen to think we’d all be a bit better served if we stopped standing in such knee-jerk judgment of what everyone else is doing, and instead kept pushing each other to detail all of the above. To deliver the Almighty Case Study that isn’t just filled with shining examples of glory and success, but the ones that help chronicle what went wrong. The hard decisions and choices that came up. The trial and error. The real world learnings that help shape our decisions.

It’s awfully easy to say that someone should have done it differently until you’ve walked in their shoes, or offered a practical alternative yourself. There are so many opportunities for constructive accountability in social media that it utterly fills my mind some days.

We all have a vested interest in weaving social media into business as a legitimate endeavor. But that means we all have a responsibility, too, to model the change that we want. On the spreadsheet, and on the human end. To do the trench work, illustrate our learnings, and demonstrate why it makes sense.

Don’t we? What does accountability mean to you? What else would you add?

image by AndYaDontStop

Breaking A Goal Into Metrics

Earlier, I posted about creating measurable objectives, because that seemed to be a hard thing for some folks to master. It requires some work, but ultimately, it’s well worth learning how to do. And it’s pivotal to today’s subject.

I keep hearing folks all over the place struggling with how to distill appropriate metrics from the goals they set. We’re still looking for some holy grail of turn-key metrics sets – the “accepted” ones that everyone uses. But here’s the thing: standard metrics are useless unless they specifically point to the goals YOU have set.

So, instead of thinking in terms of how everyone else defines success, worry about how you do. You might be able to take some hints from the guy down the street, but his goals aren’t yours, and neither should his metrics be the same.

Here’s how you can take your goals and break them down into the indicators that can help you decide whether or not you’re making progress.

Start with the Objective

Sample Objective: Use social media to increase new subscriptions to our email newsletter via the website by 15% in the first quarter.

This objective spells out specifically what we want to do, with whom, by how much, and by when. Presuming we have some subscribers to our email newsletter already (our benchmark), a 15% increase in a three month period is also measurable and realistic (following the SMART methodology).

It also presumes that we’ve done the legwork to know that increasing our email newsletter subscribers is good for business, perhaps because we get a good percentage of leads that way, or because those leads have a high conversion rate.  If your email newsletter is new, then perhaps you’ve formulated a hypothesis that it’s a valuable strategy, either via probable precedent (other people’s success), assumptions you’ve made about your business, or an out and out experiment.

Still with me? Good. Now that you know what you’re aiming for, think through your approach.

Consider your Strategies & Tools

In this example, let’s assume you’ve done some research and listening, and you’ve decided that you’d like to build strategies that involve your corporate blog , Twitter, and your company’s Facebook fan page as touchpoints and drivers. (Selecting the strategies themselves are a point for a different discussion altogether).

What you measure regarding these strategies will depend, in great part, on what you are able to measure given the tools and resources at your disposal. In this scenario, perhaps you’re able to measure with relative ease:

• Fans on Facebook, including how many new fans sign on, and during what time period to determine growth
• Followers on Twitter, including how many you accrue during finite periods (growth rate)
• Blog visitors/traffic per day/week/month, and their sources
• Engagement and interaction with you on these channels: blog comments, @ replies, likes/comments
• Sharing of your content, retweets, wall posts, links
• Traffic to your website/email signup page that comes directly from any of these places
• Conversion rates for email signups and user paths on your website

These aren’t exhaustive, but you get the drift. Start figuring out what your tools allow you to measure. Resources like listening tools (yes, like Radian6 but you can go manual/free too with more work), Google Analytics or other web analytics programs, link shorteners like Bit.ly, and URL generators like Google’s URL builder can help you with the components you need to track your efforts thoroughly.

Map Potential Paths of Action

Now that you know what you can measure with the resources you have, time to start thinking about what actions and paths people might take to do what you want them to do. In other words, for our sample objective, people might:

• See a link to your blog post on Twitter, visit your website, then sign up for the newsletter.
• See your post on Facebook promoting your upcoming newsletter issue, like it, click the link you included, and sign up.
• Read your blog post, and see the link in your post footer that suggests your email as a resource they might like.
• Take action based on specific newsletter subscription ask with a unique link in a blog post.
• Visit your website via search or other means, discover your newsletter archives from the home page, and sign up themselves.
• Engage with conversation with your representative on Twitter, be curious about your company, click the link to your website in your Twitter bio, visit, and sign up for the newsletter.
• See a whitepaper a friend sent them from your site via ShareThis, click on a link embedded in the document that sends them to a specific landing page, perhaps that includes a direct email subscription link of its own.

Note that I’ve bolded pieces of these. Those are the trackable elements and touchpoints that you can control based on the information you push out. Some of the signups for your newsletter are bound to be incidental, meaning they’re not directly connected to an action you engineered, but are as a result of a path the website visitor took and the information they sought.

And there are going to be gaps in the trackable path sometimes. Perhaps someone saw your Facebook page and didn’t click on your link, but came back to your site later via Google and then signed up for the newsletter. Facebook was an impact point, but the actual path was search traffic to signup. So you’ll have to take elements like that into consideration and account for a margin of error.

But the more breadcrumbs you can place in people’s paths to guide them to what you want them to do, the more accurately you can measure.

Determine Indicators and Metrics

So you’ve considered what you can measure, and what people might do that lead them toward your goal. What metrics indicate success?

Look at the measurements available to you, and combine them to demonstrate either probability that people will take the desired action, or definitive evidence that they did. That’s where the gold is. It’s not the single metric in itself, but the patterns they create that count. In other words, follower stats themselves are rather useless unless you can tie them to an action that has demonstrable value – in our case, the email signup. Dig?

In our example, you might track:

• Conversions (subscriptions) via Twitter-specific links or referral traffic over a 30 day period, trended over time to watch growth.  (specific)
• Comparison of  general search traffic that results in conversions vs. traffic from Twitter, Facebook, and blog views that does  (specific)
• Conversions by referral source, comparing Twitter and Facebook (specific)
• Ratio of @ replies per month to new email subscriptions via Twitter referrals (probability)
• Ratio of Facebook fan increases per month to increases in email subscriptions overall (probability)
• Percent of blog email subscribers that also sign up for the email newsletter (specific)
• Percent increase in new blog subscribers alongside new email subscribers (probability)

See where this is going? You’ve got to examine how the data you have can point to the results you want. That’s what you measure. Pick the few that give you the most specific intelligence and results.

It doesn’t matter if the guy down the street measures that or not. Over time,  you’ll be able to tell whether or not your measurements are helping you understand progress toward your goals.

If not, you tweak them or rework them. No measurement should ever be set in stone forever and ever (though you need to stick with a few for a while, say six months rolling, before you can really make a judgment call on their effectiveness). Metrics evolve just like your strategy does until something settles.

Bonus Round: Attach Actions to Results

So when you’re reporting to your boss about the progress you’ve made toward your objectives, you should be able to analyze the indicators you’ve put forward above and draw conclusions. That’s how you put together a report, and where you make your decisions about how to maintain or amend your strategy and tactics moving forward.

Some examples:

• Of 25 new blog email subscribers this month, 5 of them also subscribed to the newsletter. That’s a ratio of 5:1, and a trend we can track moving forward to see if it maintains, drops, or stays constant.
• If we’ve determined via our sales numbers that each of our email subscribers also does an average of $200 in business with us every month, we can also say that every 5 blog subscribers has the potential to be worth $200 in monthly revenue (or $40 each) at that ratio.
• Facebook fans click on our links 10% less frequently each month than our Twitter followers do. However, we get one subscriber for every ten clicks on Twitter, whereas we get three for every 10 on Facebook.
• Landing page links embedded in our whitepapers shared via ShareThis generate less than 2% of overall website traffic. (That means they’re likely not a good source of email subscribers).
• Specific subscription drives on our blog generated a 3% increase in subscribers in one month, and the same ask on Twitter generated an increase of 6.5%.

See how we’re connecting the dots, and starting to draw some assumptions and conclusions from what we’ve tracked? You need to work the data and look at it from different angles. Measurement is really kind of a waste of time if you aren’t going to do something with what you’ve learned.

In Closing

This is work, people. Do you hear me? Work. If the steps above seem daunting or like too much effort, you’ll need to get help, suck it up, or stop complaining that social media isn’t measurable. It is. But it’s not instant.

All the Google research in the world is not going to suddenly uncover a magic set of metrics that you can just adopt and run with. You’ve got to do the methodical, careful work to spell out the goals first, then figure out what measurements will tell you whether or not you’ve reached that goal. You have to build and deploy the tracking mechanisms and tools. You need to regularly capture and export the data. You need to mash it up, correlate it, and map it over time.

So, here’s a start. You’re not going to hit a home run out of the park every time. But measuring is like laundry. The more you ignore it, the more impossible it gets to tackle.

Get to it.

image by Mykl Roventine

Project Management and the Dynamite Philosophy

I’ve lost count of how many times people ask me how I stay organized and manage projects and tasks. For some reason, getting and staying organized seems to be a tough thing for a lot of people, so I promised I’d share some of what I do and what I’ve learned.

Figuring Out How you Think

Something critical about organization and project management is understanding how you process information. Not everyone does it the same way, and it requires paying attention to yourself and your first instincts when you have a new project to tackle.

For example, I’m a project-based thinker. I think in tracks or buckets. Everything relates to one larger objective, and the pieces are all part of the same path to get there, whether it’s writing or emailing or creating content or attending meetings. Some are concurrent, some have to happen in order (it always helps me to know what comes next, even theoretically). But it all falls into the same bucket.

By contrast, some people would rather sort their work by task-type. Maybe you’d rather spend three hours just knocking out writing tasks, no matter what they relate to. If you classify things in your head that way, by all means, work in functional classifications.

Maybe you separate personal vs. professional to-dos. Maybe you process things visually, or there are five key questions you need answered before starting a new project. Whatever. But pay attention to your brain process and try to work with it rather than against it.

Tools I Use

I sometimes hate sharing these kinds of lists because tools and their use is so individual. But in case it shakes loose an idea or two, here’s my core list of things that help me stay organized. All of them – aside from my Moleskine – sync with my iPhone so I can manage at the laptop or when mobile.

Evernote: This is my home for draft blog posts and meeting notes, and capturing ideas when I’m on the fly that need more attention later.

Gmail: I love the threads and the label system. And I am a RUTHLESS email deleter. See below for more.

Things: My task management application of choice. I like that I can track things in projects, check things off as I complete them, and look at the flow of tasks, in order, within their respective projects (as well as by priority or deadline). I also like that I can tag task items to categorize them a few different ways.

Moleskine: I have one that’s my personal journal, and one that’s exclusively for professional endeavors. I use it to brainstorm, doodle, and capture meeting notes in in-person meetings (when I consider having my laptop open to be a distraction to both me and others).

Google Docs & Calendar: All of my documents are contained here, everything from my planning documents for my job to my personal budget spreadsheet. Meeting requests/appointments/travel get put on the calendar right away. If it’s not on the calendar, it doesn’t exist.

That’s it. Too many tools and you won’t use them. I need a few simple functions: idea capturing, task management, information/communication management, and scheduling. I found a simple tool for each that works, but isn’t complex. More than that bogs down my pace.

How I Organize and Workflow

Not an exhaustive list, but because so many people asked, maybe a couple of these tips or tricks are helpful.

1. Again, I organize my information by project rather than task type. It helps me to know that everything and anything related to my blog goes into one bucket. Anything related to, say, building an online community for Radian6 goes in another.

2. If an email has a to-do in it – either explicit or implied – it’s added to the list and either deleted or archived (if it has information I need later). If that info is brief, I’ll copy it into the notes of the task in Things and delete the email. If it’s just an FYI or informational, I decide I either need that info for later (label and archive), or I’ve absorbed it and can delete it. Keeps the inbox shallow.

3. When I take meeting notes, I always have a spot on the page for tasks that I capture throughout the meeting. At the end of the call or meeting, I transfer those to Things and track them there. Then I can forget about the notes except as reference.

4. I only set deadlines on my tasks in Things when they really have them. I find that I don’t stick to arbitrary, self-imposed deadlines, so I just don’t bother. I tackle the deadline items first, then review the rest of the list and pick the next most logical (or attractive) thing to work on. Which brings me to…

5. When you get stuck, do the work that flows most easily. Busy work or otherwise. It’s the momentum that’s important.

6. I have a tag in my to-do list called Short Strokes. These are items that will take me less than 5 minutes and aren’t attached to a particular project. I visit those when I’m stuck and overwhelmed, on hold, in the airport, etc. They’re small wins that make me feel good about checking them off.

7. I label/tag offline items so I can do them on airplanes, because I’m on those a lot.

8. I also have a couple of houses for ideas. From my Moleskine, the ideas with teeth go into a folder in Evernote. I review them occasionally to see if any of them call out to me and warrant a move to reality and some next steps. (Breaking ideas into realistic steps is a lot more of what we’ll talk about here in 2010).

9. Tags in my email and Things coincide. That way if I’ve archived an email, I know where to look for it. I have more email labels than I do task tags, but for the most part, it helps line things up and saves me time searching for stuff.

All of these things, for me, tuck seamlessly into my workflow, and help me keep multiple tracks and projects moving forward. Not all of these things will work for you. Your pace is probably different than mine, and your methods should line up accordingly.

But tinker with a few things and see what helps you, and what just feels like more work than necessary. (Hint: if you’re spending too much effort managing your project management system, it needs revisiting.)

The Dynamite Philosophy: Blow Things Up

I tweeted earlier this week that I blew up my to-do list completely, and started over. Why? I realized that things weren’t organized in the way I needed to review them. So, I broke it all down, and started fresh.

If you haven’t answered the email lingering in your inbox, either do so, or delete it. Someday never comes.

If you find you aren’t using your to-do list, it’s probably not fitting the way you think. Nuke it. Start over.

If you haven’t read all the posts in your reader, Mark All As Read and walk away.

Once you’ve selected tools, if they don’t work, ditch them and try something else. If one method of tackling projects doesn’t work, blow it up and try something else. If you don’t need a tool anymore, get rid of it. This isn’t a forever relationship. Your organizational style and attack on projects needs to evolve with you. If I’d stuck to the work style I used five years ago, it would be crippling me today.

Lastly, realize that no system is bulletproof or perfect. Do the best you can. Tweak it, refine it, but stop obsessing over organization. The system isn’t the goal. You’re trying to get your stuff done. Over engineering kills action, every time.

So what are your keys for getting stuff done? What systems and methods work for you?

Four Words for 2010

I’m breaking with convention a bit here, and instead of three words to frame my year, I’m choosing four.  They’re all related, and intertwine. They may or may not make sense to you, but perhaps they’ll get you thinking about yours, and what your guideposts will be for the coming year.

Discipline.

This has several connotations to me, related to all facets of my life. Discipline in how I choose my endeavors, to be sure they fit into the bigger picture (see Chords below). Discipline in terms of patience and temperance, to step back and breathe before I react, assume, or imagine the worst (the opposite of which is one of my weaknesses). The discipline to let my thoughts simmer sometimes, and come together when they’re ready, instead of feeling like I have to force them. The discipline to make time in my day for the things that are important to me, whether that’s doing a puzzle with my daughter, or setting aside dedicated time to read or write.

Canteen.

I  used to love to camp as a kid, and set off on adventures through the woods with my knife and a canteen full of water. The trick? The canteen only holds so much. And if you can’t find a fresh water source to replenish it, you’re out of luck (and thirsty, which can end up dangerous). I learned the hard way in 2009 that I have a tendency to chase after some things so hard that I leave little water in the canteen for other things. The result? Burnout. It’s related to Discipline. I need to learn how to ration my energy and time so that it’s used in the right places, when I can make the most of it.

Chords.

I have, at any one time, several things I’m trying to do at once. From my day job to my other professionally-related passions to my personal interests, they really need something to tie them all together.

In music, if you’ve got a chord progression on paper – a unifying language, if you will – you can improvise a bit with those chords and scales, and still stay pretty well in sync. It’s a theme. A thread. But not spelled out to the detail. You can take a few liberties, or you can play straight. But those threads of tonality through the whole thing will keep you moving in the same, coordinated direction, even if you vamp for a while. I need that.

Fleet.

It’s rarely a single ship that manages to get anything done. It’s usually a fleet of ships, and each one has a purpose within the overall expedition. Most importantly of all, no one person can sail all the ships at once, and each ship needs a captain, in charge of their own mission within the fleet.  I need to hone my delegation skills, and my ability to empower and equip people while letting them own their own course.

So, those are mine for this year. Have you thought about what ideas or themes are going to keep you on track this year? I’m curious to see if mine help for the long haul, and how I might have to tweak them along the way. If you’ve posted on yours, please share below. And if not, leave a comment and let us know what you’ve got planned.

image credit: ayel Aheram