Who do you want to meet that would change the course of your business? If you're not willing to get on a plane to meet them in person, you're missing a huge opportunity. I'll save you all the terrible analogies (including the one about online dating vs meeting in real life). Meeting someone. Shaking his or her hand. Breaking bread across a table. It creates a connection you will never get from LinkedIn comments. It may feel like a lot of money to book a flight, pay for a hotel room, get the...
1 day ago • 1 min read
So much marketing advice and guidance is about how we take our message to our customers. What if you want customers to come to you instead? I'm not talking about 'inbound marketing.' That works, too, but this is something a bit different. Let's call it the Oopsy Daisy. If you want to have more customer conversations, but find it hard to get anyone to talk to you. Break something on purpose. We've done this in software. I've done it with service reports. And I bet you can find a way to "break"...
3 days ago • 1 min read
AI is eating the world. And whether you like it or not, it's a hungry beast. My co-founder Kate attended Intercom's big partner and customer event. Intercom is going all in on AI. They launched a new AI customer support agent named Fin. Fin is not an LLM. It's not trained on the web. It's trained on the documentation, knowledgebase, and other content we feed it. For Fin to work best, it needs us to write down as much as we can about our software. It needs the technical side. It needs to use...
4 days ago • 1 min read
Speed. That's what we talk about when we talk about AI. In particular, for the marketing and sales side of things. We talk about speed: Speed to produce content. Speed to create new ideas. But also the speed we might be left behind if we don't learn how to use this stuff. To keep pace and to build a nimble marketing capability, we're trying a new thing. I created a Jira* project called Marketing Tests. It's simple. There's a list of ideas to test. A list of experiments we're running right...
5 days ago • 1 min read
A couple Mondays ago, I caught myself looking for a way out of a conversation. You know the kind? Someone ages ago scheduled a call for today and now that today’s here it’s not really a good day for a call. I was busy. I had deadlines and kids to pick up. What was I doing on this call? When this happens, when I start looking for the exit, a little voice pings from inside my head: “Everyone has something they can teach you. If you think they don’t, you are doing it wrong.” I don’t know if I...
6 days ago • 1 min read
Running a business without budgeting and forecasting is like flying blind. Here are two resources I use (plus one I'd like to try) to keep Accoil Analytics on track: We use Causal to build sophisticated forecasts and budgets. This isn't for the faint of heart. Starter templates help you get going. Tailoring models to your business or unit can take a while. Still, it's a powerful tool. I use Taylor Davidson's templates at Foresight.is. Taylor offers a ton for free (amazing value) to get you...
7 days ago • 1 min read
Traveling for work is fun (don't tell my wife). I like good beer and finding new places to try new drinks. On a recent trip, I found a bar. And then I made a mistake. I stood at the bar and didn't know which beer I wanted. Unhappy bartender. I picked one. The bartender asked "What size?" while looking past me into the dining room. I made another mistake. There were no sizes on the menu. So I shrugged and we stood in silence for a moment. "I'll take the biggest you got." That got a laugh. Then...
8 days ago • 1 min read
If you just set out to be liked, you will be prepared to compromise on anything at anytime, and would achieve nothing. -- Margaret Thatcher, the first female Prime Minister of the UK. I don't know if anyone needs to hear that today. It's ok to do things that are good for your business but may make some people not like you. In fact, it's more than ok. It's the only way to grow a business or a product or even personally. Say no to a proposal even when you really like the team behind it Stop a...
9 days ago • 1 min read
There are times when good enough has to be what the world sees. But rarely does the world know which version they're seeing. If you've gone to a wedding, there's the wedding the bride and groom planned and there's the wedding that everyone experiences. I've never been part of a webinar that didn't have a few technical hiccups. Every website launch has last-minute scrambles before go-live. We have to do the best work we can up to that moment when our plans meet the world. In that moment we...
10 days ago • 1 min read