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I couldn’t come up with an intro this week. Not sure why, but it was tough. And I feel like I need to make it good since my colleagues did such a great job of covering for me last week. However – admitting my writer’s block is, in essence, creating an intro. A compelling one? You tell me!

Give this song a listen with me, and see how this band got over their writer’s block by writing a song about writing the song! (Too ‘meta’ for you?) Plus… who hasn’t pulled an all-nighter to meet a deadline – am I right?

Staring Blindly into Space

Sometimes you need some hard facts to help centre you and get you focused. If you want to increase productivity and revenue at your organization, you have to focus on metrics that matter.

Revenue teams have become increasingly more data-driven, which makes it easy to get bogged down in tracking every little data point. B2B Marketing Zone provides a guide to help you stay data-driven while avoiding data overload by focusing on four categories:

  • Sales enablement
  • Sales effectiveness
  • Sales readiness
  • Sales engagement

I like how these are defined and some of the tactical examples. Some are pretty standard (such as win rate, churn rate, and time to close), while things like impact to discounting, lead velocity rate, and contact instances per demo are some metrics I’ve seen used much less frequently.

Many organizations simply accept that these are qualitative metrics and don’t measure them. But if you’re looking to scale your teams, you need to build a strong data-driven process.

How do you track these categories? DO you track them?

Searching for Something to Say

Sometimes, as a musical artist, it’s better to let the audience fill in the blanks. Who hasn’t been at a concert where the singer stops singing and lets the audience sing the chorus? Those can be magical moments at a show and really solidify the bond and engagement between the artist and the fans.

Now, how about songs where the audience creates their own lyrics to complement the song? A great example of this is the song “Mony Mony” – most notably, Billy Idol’s cover version. Being a high school student in the late ’80s, I can remember every time this song came on, and the lewd lyrics that were sung in response to Billy’s chorus vocals. How did they start? How did it spread across the world?

Interestingly, Alan Cross has been studying the origin of these ‘special lyrics,’ and shares his fascinating findings.

This shows how a little bit of myth and legend can make something bigger than it seems. It adds all sorts of magic and mystique to the song and increases audience engagement. And ultimately, helps sell more albums for the artist!

Should I try to do some more? Maybe there is some way – a little nudge – that you can get your customers to expand on your service offerings (hopefully in a positive way) and increase engagement.

As always, don’t hesitate to call me to brainstorm or just say hello.

Looking forward,
Rick

Rick Endrulat, President | ricke@v-causeway.com | www.linkedin.com/in/rickendrulat