When we were kids,
my siblings and I begged our mom every October to roast the seeds we pulled
from the guts of our pumpkins. Every
year she burned them beyond consumption.
They looked bad. They smelled
bad. And they usually went into the
garbage can as soon as they were cool enough.
Several years ago, I
started thinking about those pumpkin seeds and tried roasting them myself. I learned, thanks to a quick recipe search on
the internet, that the key to successfully roasting pumpkin seeds is to go low
and slow. Seeds scorch and burn at high
temperatures, but when you roast them at 250 degrees for two hours…mmmmmmm.
Sometimes we get so
focused on getting results that we forget to be patient and wait. We call a campaign or a channel or a technology
or a visit a failure when we don’t see immediate results. But that’s not always the case.
The next time you
find yourself turning up the temperature in an attempt to hasten results,
stop. Mistakes, miscommunication, and
misdirection occur when fear and eagerness replace strategy and patience. Instead, wait. Wait for the direct mail piece to drop. Wait for your market to review, process, and
respond to your campaign. Wait for a new
procedure or system to take hold and become routine. Wait to overcome a learning curve. Just wait.
Once you’ve done
that, if a marketing effort has still fallen short of expectations, go back and
analyze everything. Analyze all aspects
of the campaign and its delivery to see if there’s a problem that can be
corrected, timing that should be tweaked, content that needs reworked, or more
contact/repeated exposure that should be scheduled.
Good things develop
when you give good planning and effort a chance.
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