During my time as a marketer, I’ve found one of the most effective sales enablement techniques is to remind sales professionals of resources they already have access to. Why is this so effective? Simply put, people forget.
The odd thing about marketers is that we all know a message needs to be repeated some number of times before it’s received; and yet, in our own work, we send out one slide deck summarizing six months of work and we assume our job of communicating internally is done. Not only does this cause marketers to lose their jobs with alarming frequency (no one knows what we do all day) but also, it’s a colossal waste of human endeavor. We spend so much time producing beautiful sales materials and no one remembers to come get them.
Friday Goody Bag started on the MBTA train somewhere between Davis Square and North Quincy, one of the legs of my long commute between Medford and Norwell, Mass. I used to take out my laptop to try to get some work done. It occurred to me that I could do our sales team a great service simply by reminding them of things they already knew. I didn’t want to overwhelm people by sending email at random times, so I used my Friday morning commute to write an email with three case studies or whitepapers our team could use in their selling process. I got some feedback that they found Friday Goody Bag helpful.
Then I realized that a lot of people didn’t know how to do “simple” things like add stripes to an Excel sheet or make their LinkedIn URL show their real name. My approach to these things is usually to pause and take a few minutes to figure it out, but I can appreciate why not everyone does this. So I started adding “work hacks” to the topics included in each Friday Goody Bag email. Also, I realized that following good sales practice is easier when you have good tools. That’s when I came up with “How to write a good thank-you note” and the related “Thank-you Prompterator.”
This summer, I was talking with Mark Emerson, my ex-grandboss and still one of my mentors. He made an offhand comment: “I think Friday Goody Bag may have a life beyond our company.” The next week, I emailed him: “Check this out…” Mark has earned a position as a Founding Member of the Friday Goody Bag Advisory board (the perquisite, right now, is this respectful mention).
I know there are a lot of “life hack” websites (I read and enjoy a lot of them). Over the years, I’ve noticed a lot of them become somewhat corrupt: you can barely read them through all the pop-up ads, or they contain a lot of weak sponsored content. As much as possible, I’ll adhere to the following rules:
- I’ll keep Friday Goody Bag free of ads and sponsored content.
- I won’t recommend software that costs money, even if it has a free trial version.
- I’ll be respectful of subscribers (I’ll honor unsubscribes, not share your data with others, and only send you the type of content you signed up for).
You could have done a lot of other things with the last few minutes, so if you were interested enough to read this far, I thank you! You can ask me questions by emailing naomi (dot) stringfield (at) gmail (dot) com.
Sincerely yours,
Naomi Stringfield
November 29, 2019