Today I resisted the impulse on focusing on other things and I carved out some hours purely to reflect, and more specifically to reflect on marketing.
Now, it did not feel great and I am not thrilled with the results.
I understand rationally that reflecting and in particular reflecting on marketing is a great investment of my time. I spend most of my time on things I need to do to make the company works or in activities with a small return. Spending time improving our marketing strategy (this actually means, coming up with one…) has the potential to significantly impact our business. At this moment we can close sales, we can deliver projects with satisfaction for the client and profitably for us. We have some structure so that we can add more people on delivery and grow the business, provided we get more leads. So this a key element and if we could double the number of sales we could double the company. We cannot get these same returns by working on other aspects of the business.
While I know this is important, why I don’t do it more often?
First of all I have difficulty finding the time. I have many others ways I can spend my time with. There are urgent things that I need to get solved and I cannot delegate. The reality is that whatever cannot be properly delegated to anyone has to be solved by me. If my assistant has a problem configuring a certain tool I do not feel I can delegate helping her to other employees, as they have precise role, so in the end I act as the assistant of the assistant. I normally do what is left to do, including all the activities which are beneath other’s level. There is simply no activity beneath my level.
Another factor is that other activities are more enjoyable than reflecting on marketing. I think this is the case because 1) I am good at the other activities while I do not feel good at marketing strategy 2) The feedback cycle for Marketing strategy is so damn long, while I can get immediate feedback on other activities.
Compare working on a secondary feature on a software product with working on the marketing strategy. Maybe developing the feature could increase a tiny bit the chance of selling that product or increase by a tiny bit its value. There is also a high chance it could just produce no valuable result. Yet, I enjoy writing software and I can make real progress in a matter of hours, concluding the day with a nice feeling of having achieved something. It is a misleading feeling perhaps, but it is nice nevertheless. When working on marketing strategy instead I feel confused all the time. I just not sure what I should do. Even when I have some idea I typically need time to implement it and then I will need months to see results, if any. I cannot measure progress easily, and that makes more even more uncertain. In the end it feels as an hopeless exercise.
So today in a couple of hours spent reflecting on marketing I concluded:
- It is hard and I am not sure how to get better at it
- At the moment I should focus on promoting parsers, as they are our strategic priority. Given parsers are components in larger solutions and not useful per se we should focus on promoting transpilers. To do so we could interview companies building transpilers and using transpilers. We could also focus on specific translations for which there are not plenty of alternatives already. For example, from VBA to C++.
- Later we should focus on “Smart editors for Subject Matter Experts”, putting the accent on editors and not on the technology behind them (DSLs and projectional editing)
It really does not feel like huge progress, but I am probably an idiot expecting to fix my marketing strategy the first time I spend a couple of hours reflecting on it!