Finding Balance Between Planning and Doing

Christina Pappas is a Inbound Marketing Professional with a passion for content marketing, lead generation and social media. She is an avid blogger at The Content Cocktail which focuses on how to leverage a vendor agnostic approach to lead generation in order to increase conversions and bottom-line revenue. Christina is a marketing communications and lead generation professional who has spent most of her career at B2B technology companies and in the hospitality industry.

I had originally set out to write this article about planning (why you should have a plan, what to consider, how to conceptualize one, etc.) but as I thought more heavily on the topic, I started to have second thoughts.

Have you heard the phrase ‘dip your toe in knowing you are going to swim?’ How about ‘crawl before you run’?

Yes? Used them often? I know I have but in most cases it was to ward off the sales person at a company that was selling advertising programs to me.

The only way to dip your toe in and actually know you are going to swim is to have a plan.

Consider that. In order to know you are going to swim you have to have a plan. How about learning to swim? How about starting in the kiddie pool, trying a bit, failing sometimes or failing often and then knowing you are going to swim?

Lead generation is one of my favorite pieces of marketing and tends to be the primary focus of my position at the various companies for whom I’ve worked. It would be fantastic to know I was going to ‘swim’ each time I launched a program or tried something new. But it’s not very realistic.

When I consider the lead generation plan and think through a 3, 6 or 12 month calendar, I consider where I have been the previous 3, 6 or 12 months. Generally, I will look for trends and start calculating ROI numbers for what was spent and what was returned. In the last two positions I have held, there was no historical data. I had to start fresh.

While I do have a plan and do put predictions on what I believe the return will be based on my experiences and the data I have on audience behavior, waiting to ‘swim’ can cost my sales team leads. All the time I am planning and not doing, I am not generating. This hurts.

Have you ever walked into a store and seen a product on a shelf and say ‘hey, I thought of that years ago.’ I thought the same thing when I wrote an essay on how we should be able to access and surf the internet on mobile phones in 1996 that won me a scholarship.

Planning is great but too much planning may be detrimental. You never know if the guy down the street is just a little more edgy than you or has a little less – or no – red tape to navigate through. Your product may be a runner-up because you planned just a little too much for a little too long. Your competitor may have published a whitepaper on the same subject you just wrote on and published it just one day sooner.

Marketing is all about risks, it’s one of my favorite things about being in this field. Planning is wonderful and I am not saying we avoid it all together, but merely suggest that you jump in and just start kicking. You will eventually get to the surface.

How do you balance planning and doing in your business? At what point do you say, “enough with the planning, it’s time to execute.”?

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Tagged as: Advertising and Marketing, Christina Pappas, Content Cocktail, guest post, Lead generation, ROI, small business