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Big agency results with small agency hustle without
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being completely overwhelmed.
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Is that even possible?
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Sure it is.
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It's called agile marketing.
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Could you use some of that marketing magic in your agency?
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Join me in this week's guest Stacy Ackerman for another
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episode of Strategy Talk.
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Stay tuned.
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I'll be right back.
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Let's strategize together.
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Let's hear it from an expert.
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Join the conversation.
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It's informative and free.
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You and me, let's talk some strategy.
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Now
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here's your host, Dorien Morin-van Dam
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hello everybody.
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My name is Dorien Morin-van Dam.
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Welcome to strategy talks.
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If you're watching this life, we'd love to know where you're watching from,
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whether you're on YouTube, Facebook, or LinkedIn, but in the comments.
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So my guests and I know where you're watching.
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If you're watching on the replay, we would love to know.
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That you are so put hashtag replay in the comments and we can answer
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any questions that you have.
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And last but not least, welcome to those of you who listen to strategy
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talks and some podcasts want to make sure that you feel welcome as well
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and that you are included in this conversation we're about to have.
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So without much further ado, I'm going to bring up onto the stage my
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friend Stacey Ackerman hi, Stacey.
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How are you today?
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I'm great.
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Thanks so much for having me here today.
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I'm excited.
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My first live.
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I know when you were just telling me in the green room, I
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was like, wow, that's exciting.
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It's just like riding a bicycle.
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You've been on video before.
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It's just live.
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There might be a bunch of people watching and a lot of, I have to say
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most of the bulk of the people that are going to watch this live are
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actually not going to watch it live.
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That's might be a little more comforting to you than not.
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So for those of you who are here, who are watching, who are
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listening, who is Stacey Ackerman?
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Stacey is a well known thought leader in the agile software
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and agile marketing communities.
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For a decade, she has successfully transformed traditionally run
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companies into cultures and teams that embrace agility.
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She's a regular contributor on agile marketing for MarTech.
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And Forbes coaches council and speaks at global agile conferences,
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including multiple years at the global scrum gathering.
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She's helped numerous companies, including MetLife, Shipt, Sleep Number, Best
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Buy, all of those to become more agile.
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She holds a bachelor's in journalism and communication and a master in
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organizational change management.
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Stacy, where are you located?
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I am in the Raleigh, North Carolina area.
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That's right.
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I forgot about that.
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Yeah, we talked about that.
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So for those of you who know anything about me who follow strategy talks
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and follow myself and more in media I might've mentioned that about four
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years ago I took an agile marketing course and Stacy was my teacher.
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So that's how Stacy and I met.
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I was introduced to agile marketing two days in New York city.
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About the same week that the world shut down when COVID started and it was
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a crazy time, but I learned so much.
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And the one thing that I can tell you as you're listening, as you're
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watching this, is that when Stacey was teaching me the agile way, it just felt.
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Familiar to me.
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And I think once I put one on one together, a lot of the ways agilis
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think and work is how I was raised in the Netherlands with a Calvinistic
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upbringing and the society the way it is.
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So it just felt like it was a great framework for me.
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But the other piece to that was as a social media marketer was
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very different than what Stacey initially, what you were teaching.
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So let's talk about what is agile marketing and why did I, why might I have
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had A little bit of an issue or a problem initially connecting it to social media.
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Could you talk about that a little bit?
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Yeah,
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absolutely.
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Abtl really in itself is just about being responsive, being quick to change.
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I would say planning at the last responsible moment, not being really
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stuck in your ways and coming up with an annual plan that you can't pivot
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from and it's so needed in today's marketing world and world in general,
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because we don't know what's happening.
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When we do think about the pandemic happening and all these other
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events in the world and how our customers needs change so quickly.
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So we need to have this agility and flexibility.
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And if you read a lot of the business publications, you'll see with AI agility
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not the practice, but the mindset of agility is one of the really hugely
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needed skills as we get into this more artificial intelligence world.
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So it's really interesting.
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To answer your second question about the social media piece, why it didn't relate.
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Typically when we were teaching agile, we're thinking about it a
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little bit from a large organization perspective, because those are the
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folks that are the least agile.
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Generally, the bigger the company, the least agile they are, and
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the more training that they require because they're used.
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to a lot of functional silos and different departmental handoffs, et cetera.
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But even a small social media business can benefit from aspects of agility,
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the mindset, the workflows, different ways that we can approach it.
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And I'm a small business owner myself, and I take all of those.
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concepts, not every single one of them but many of them in my own business too.
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Yeah.
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So let's talk about that.
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I'm going completely off script.
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But what are some of the practices or, there, there's a lot of practices, right?
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Agile agility or The Agile framework is built on several principles and values,
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but what are some of the practices that you, as a small business owner use or
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that you implement in your daily workflow?
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Yeah,
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I would say that probably the one that I like the most is my backlog.
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And I use a Trello board.
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Trello is a tool to manage your workflow where I look and plan my week out.
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So I will do a weekly planning with my business partner.
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We'll look at our prioritized list.
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That's our backlog of Upcoming work and we'll think about what
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do we need to do this week?
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We also do what we call a blueprint which gives us our quarterly big goal And we
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can always take those little chunks and say are we on target for our big goal?
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Are we close?
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Are we not close?
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Are we doing the right work or are we getting sidetracked?
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And then we have this visible board where we can hold each other accountable.
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So we're just a team of two people and we can hold each other accountable
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and we can see where work as in the workflow throughout the week.
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So those are a couple of things that big companies do, but
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even as with two people we do.
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So we plan and we have a backlog and we have almost what I would call
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weekly cycles, weekly work cycles.
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So it works really well.
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That's great.
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Can I ask you to explain the difference between a to-do list and a backlog?
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I think for me that was like one of the biggest aha moments
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when I was in your class.
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Yeah.
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So
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a backlog is ideas of things you may or may not do in the future.
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It isn't commitment and it is what we call emergent and evolving.
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So you just keep, think of that as like a.
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placeholder for ideas and things that you want to do in the future.
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And then the year to do list is what we call when we go into planning.
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We might go on Monday morning, we plan our week, we move some of those
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items that are at the top of our backlog, because we've said those
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are the ones bubbling to the top.
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surface.
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We move those into to do.
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We think about maybe we pick three or four of them for the
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week that we want to accomplish.
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And then that kind of becomes our weekly plan.
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So we're really only committing to them once we say, okay,
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we're starting this new cycle.
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We're going to commit to those
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things.
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That's awesome.
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So let's talk about the overwhelm and the rapid pace.
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How can Agile, Agile principles help a small agency, a small team,
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break down some of the challenges and manageable pieces of say content
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creation or anything like that.
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And you talked about it with the backlog and the to do, but is there, are
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there any other things that we can do?
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Sometimes it just, everything comes at you all at once, and so how.
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Because that's really one of the biggest pain points that I hear my colleagues
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say, small business owners, marketers, like it, the floodwaters the floodgates
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open and all of a sudden there's all this work and then there's this dry period.
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How do you, when you get that rapid overwhelm, what are some
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things that you can do that help you move out of that panic mode?
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Yeah, I think that's a really good point.
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And I do content marketing for other people as well, so I can
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completely relate to this one.
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I don't think you can lose sight of strategy.
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And what happens too often is the content marketer just gets fed
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things instead of being a part of that strategy conversation.
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And a practice that we do with our clients is called a blueprint, and it's
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really looking at what is our strategy.
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You can do it by the month, you can do it by the quarter.
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We usually will do it by the quarter.
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But if it's rapidly moving, you can do like a monthly strategy.
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And what are those high level outcomes that you're looking for?
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Because content marketing isn't about how much content you can produce.
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It's about what outcomes you're looking to produce.
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And that's really the beauty in agile marketing too, is we really want to
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take that business perspective and look at what outcomes do we want
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and trying to set those things.
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And so we call those success criteria and I encourage marketers.
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To write success criteria.
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Hey, what is our success criteria?
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Maybe with this new, blog series that we're trying to do, what
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are we hoping to gain from it?
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Because maybe it's going to take 10 posts and maybe it's going to take two to
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get to it.
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Okay.
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All right.
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That's I love that.
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And I love that you talked about strategy because that's something
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that, I definitely teach and I implement strategy first.
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We always go back to the strategy no matter what tactics people want to try or
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trends are coming or patterns they see on.
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So especially on social, but things are fast changing.
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If our strategy is To get brand awareness.
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Why would we jump on a silly trend and make a dancing video?
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If that's not going to really help us with brand awareness.
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So making sure that what you.
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You know what you create or what you're asked to create lines up
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with the strategy, I think is great.
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So small teams, tight budgets, right?
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Small agency, small budgets.
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How can Agile help optimize maybe resources?
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And making sure that the initiative they want to do get the right
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time, get the right attention.
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Yeah.
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I think that once again does tie back to 1, the strategy,
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but also the data and analytics behind how things are performing.
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So you need to look at those things on both ends.
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What are we trying to accomplish?
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You can't accomplish everything.
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And so really nailing that down and having focus.
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Agile marketing is really about strong focus.
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And then looking even at every single piece and saying do we continue this or do
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we abort the mission, so to speak, right?
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And I've had many times where I think I'm going down a path or a client does
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and it doesn't perform like you expect.
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So the ability to stop and pivot.
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And the ability for your clients to recognize that is a big piece of this.
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We don't want to continue just doing things because someone asked for them.
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You want to work smarter, not harder.
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Oh, I love that you said that about the data.
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So the data will tell you whether you should continue or not.
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And if you're not, first of all, Guys, if you're not looking at your data
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and like Stacy said earlier, if you have a year plan and you're sticking
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to that and you put your blinders on, you could be doing something
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that's not working for six months.
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Like why would you do that?
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So you've got to look at your data constantly and adjust.
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Your strategy stays the same.
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Your tactics will change.
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So I love that you that you mentioned that.
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So there was something else that I wanted to.
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And it just totally lost my train of thought.
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As far as agile, if people think about agile and agile marketing if somebody
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wants to learn more, Stacey, and I know I have some more questions about how to
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implement this, but somebody, might be watching this and they're like, okay,
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I'd love everything that Stacey's saying.
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I need agility in my company.
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Cool.
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And how and where can somebody learn about it, but also who is usually the
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decision maker in a company that says, let's just hire an agile marketer or
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let's just implement agile and if somebody is watching and this is social media
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manager, could they bring it to the C suite if somebody is CMO and watching and
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says, how do I bring this to my C suite?
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They're part of the C suite, but how do I sell this to my colleagues?
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If somebody is the CEO of a company and says, I have a marketer and
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I want them to be more agile.
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How does that work, Stacey?
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Cause this is what you do, right?
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You go into companies.
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Can you explain that a little bit?
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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Depending on the size of the company, but we always want
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to start with training, right?
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You have to understand what agile is and how it works and how it fits
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into the way that you work and what goals you want out of it, right?
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Because Some people are trying to do it because they want to
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get better at prioritization.
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Some people want to get better at speed to market.
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There can be different aspects of that.
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But we do training coaching Mentoring, coming into organizations
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and basically helping you figure out your best path forward.
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We always in a larger company, particularly suggest training leaders
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first and foremost, so that they understand what they're asking teams
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to do that is really important.
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And then in hiring people, you definitely want to look for people
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that are a little bit more well rounded than overly specialized
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because an agile team is all about.
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Looking at the business goal, not the tactical thing you're trying to do.
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That will really help.
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And it is about teamwork.
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A team can be, a two person team, or maybe you're one person doing this.
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Or it can be a team of eight or ten people, depending on
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the size of the organization.
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But one thing I can tell you, which is a fun story, the very first
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experience I ever had with Agile, and this is over ten years ago.
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Was I was working at a software development company and my client was
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an ad agency And my end client was a major consumer brand And we were
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working in three different silos, and the agency called me every single day,
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not every, multiple times a day, shall we say, with the next crisis, the next
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emergency need that they needed for their website, and it was so chaotic.
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I was the project manager in this case, to give you perspective.
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And a colleague of mine just started like saying, Oh, here's agile and he
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was whiteboarding it in the office.
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And just like you, I went God, that makes a lot of sense.
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This is common sense.
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Why are we working this way?
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So I actually started experimenting with this before I've ever taken a
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training class and really knew anything.
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But here are the things I did that you can try as well.
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So I said to my agency client, do you have planned work?
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That, you want to do, we created a shared backlog.
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They put the planned work and we created this shared backlog.
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And then instead of getting about 10 phone calls a day, I only got a few a week.
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Like we started going, okay, now we have a little space for those emergencies, but
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most of them are no longer emergencies.
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And this made us more efficient as a team.
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The second thing that I did was I broke down those silos.
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We were at three different locations, the agency, the end
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client, and the development team.
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We got on video conference weekly, looked at the website, talked about it.
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It was informal.
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It brought us together.
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We had real time discussions on priorities, what needs to be done next.
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Those two things alone sold me on agile.
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I was like, Oh my God, this
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works.
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That is, I love that.
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That's a great segue to what I experienced when once I had taken the
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agile marketing workshop with you and I got certified, the world shut down.
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And I had a lot of time to think about how I wanted to implement, but I was
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by myself in Vermont, a team of one.
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And it took me a couple of months, but then I realized
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I'm a team of multiple people.
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If I myself and my client is a team, right?
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00:17:48
So I started implementing some of these agile practices and principles
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00:17:53
and values that you taught me in the class with my clients.
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And what I found is.
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And this is something for you guys.
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00:17:59
I say this all the time.
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00:18:00
And if you follow me, you've heard me say this, meet with your clients more often.
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00:18:07
It's it seemed counterproductive, right?
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00:18:09
I had clients who was a meeting with once a month.
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00:18:11
And the more you meet with your client, the more, what's going on.
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00:18:15
The more they are.
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00:18:16
forward with sharing their plans of what's coming.
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00:18:19
And instead of always being behind the ball, which is Stacy, what
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00:18:22
you just said, you can plan ahead.
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You can have that planned work.
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00:18:26
You can, your their last minute thoughts can still fit in because you've
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00:18:30
already done all the planned work.
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00:18:32
So I love that you brought that up because that's exactly what I experienced.
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00:18:37
So if you're a small agency or small business owner if you're working with,
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00:18:43
Other people say you're a marketer and you're working with other people consider
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00:18:47
your client to be part of your team.
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00:18:49
And so when you're in a meeting you talk about the planned work
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00:18:53
and then what needs to get done.
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00:18:54
So I absolutely love that, that you just said that.
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00:18:57
And that was a really great story, Stacey.
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Thank you.
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00:19:00
So when we move into relationships we're talking about communication.
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00:19:05
What are some differences between People are communicating right
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00:19:12
now and how when you're doing agile where you're being agile.
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00:19:17
What was, what does communication, what are some of those differences?
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00:19:21
Especially in either agency life or small teams.
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00:19:25
Yeah, I think the big difference is it tends to be less of a quote, a
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00:19:30
meeting where somebody just tells you what to work on and a collaborative
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00:19:35
brainstorming around the work.
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00:19:37
So that's one thing that we do at our company.
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00:19:39
We always suggest a quarterly collaborative brainstorming.
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00:19:42
Where everybody that's going to be involved in the work, whether you're the
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agency partner working with the company, et cetera sits in a room or sits on a
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00:19:51
zoom call for a few hours and you look at what desired outcomes there are, you
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00:19:56
brainstorm what ideas you have and you come up with this kind of shared alignment
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00:20:01
and then really talking very regularly.
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00:20:05
Depending on the type of work we suggest usually like a daily huddle
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00:20:08
for 10 minutes, 15 minutes, just to say anything in your way today.
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How's it going?
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00:20:13
Can I help you out?
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00:20:15
So that's how communication changes.
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00:20:18
And I would say there's 2 sides to the coin when we're talking about.
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00:20:22
Agencies, there's how you work internally in your agency and then
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00:20:26
there's how you work with your clients.
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00:20:28
And so I wanna make that important distinction.
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00:20:30
So when you're learning Agile as an agency, you're
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00:20:32
learning two sides of the coin.
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00:20:35
And I will say that a lot of corporate clients that I have worked with
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have fired their agency partners who have not gotten on board with
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Agile or who don't understand it.
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00:20:44
So this is really important as more and more companies.
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00:20:47
are pivoting to this way of working that if you're their agency partner,
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00:20:51
you can come along with that and change how we work with them.
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00:20:55
And there's quite a bit that you actually need to do a little differently when
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00:20:58
you're talking about a corporate agile
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00:20:59
client.
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00:21:01
Can you talk about that?
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00:21:03
What are some of those things that are different?
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00:21:04
Yeah,
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00:21:05
absolutely.
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00:21:06
So one of the biggest thing that I have seen as you don't want to necessarily
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00:21:11
present them with a dumb strategy.
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00:21:14
Okay, so you'll want to partner with what they call their marketing owner.
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00:21:20
If you are doing the agency strategy and really work alongside with
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00:21:23
them, a doodling duo, and you really work with them to ideate on the
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00:21:27
backlog, but it's very different.
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00:21:29
So when I worked with corporate clients and their agency comes in
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00:21:32
and everything's done and laid out.
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00:21:35
That goes against the grain of agile.
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00:21:37
So it's really difficult.
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00:21:39
And then if you're on the agency side, that's producing creative or
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00:21:43
producing work you really would do it along with the corporate team.
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00:21:46
So you participate with them as a team, you participate in your clients, huddles
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00:21:51
and your clients planning, et cetera.
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00:21:53
And so you work on their timeline and into their process.
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00:21:58
And I see this happen all the time.
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00:22:00
It's a great but it is a change from how agencies have traditionally operated.
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00:22:05
That is actually very insightful because I've experienced that where, it's hard
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00:22:11
to work with a corporate client and being able to figure out how they work
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00:22:18
as a team and fitting in I, I love that idea or the way you framed this.
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00:22:24
For us to understand I heard you say earlier, one of the issues that you
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00:22:29
ran into when you were working and when you first discovered agile was
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00:22:33
that everybody was working in silos and that's something that's come up.
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00:22:38
I was talking to a friend who had gone to content marketing
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00:22:41
world and he said that the.
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00:22:44
The word of the conference was silos.
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00:22:46
Every presentation he went to people were talking about stop working in silos.
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00:22:51
So it's coming to social media.
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00:22:52
It's coming to everywhere.
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00:22:54
But what does that really mean when we say stop working in silos?
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00:22:58
What does that mean?
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00:22:59
And how does it change when you apply agile to this?
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00:23:04
Yeah.
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00:23:04
I have a funny story.
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00:23:05
So I have a client that I went to work with.
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00:23:08
Who said, we're really great at agile.
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00:23:11
We've been practicing agile already for a year.
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00:23:13
And I said, okay, show me what you're doing.
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00:23:16
And then they said, here's our graphic design team and they're
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00:23:19
cranking out work all the time.
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00:23:21
They're super efficient.
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00:23:22
They work, they work in a team, they work in a backlog.
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00:23:26
They do all the right.
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00:23:27
things, right?
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00:23:29
Where's the problem with this?
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00:23:30
They're working in a silo and only producing graphic design without strategy,
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00:23:35
without content, without anybody else.
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00:23:38
So nothing they're producing, even though they're doing it really
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00:23:41
fast, is usable to a client.
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00:23:43
And then they were upset because their, their content writers were on a completely
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00:23:49
different project and different pace.
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00:23:50
So you guys have, you have to align.
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00:23:54
And so when we want to think about it, an agile team, we're looking
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00:23:57
at all the people that it takes to deliver something to a customer end
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00:24:02
to end versus handing off that baton.
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00:24:05
So a typical agile team might have a social media person and
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00:24:10
you might have a data analyst.
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00:24:12
You might have a software developer on that team.
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00:24:14
You might have a graphic designer or writer.
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00:24:16
Strategist.
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00:24:17
So you're putting in all those pieces where traditionally you would have to
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00:24:21
go hand that to a different department and think about how long that takes
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00:24:26
and how much it gets lost in the process of what that can end product
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00:24:32
is to customers by the time you do that versus everybody sitting and
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00:24:35
talking about it together and ideating.
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00:24:37
And the idea with an agile team is that all those different roles Are working
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00:24:41
together to offer different perspectives to come up with a really great end result,
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00:24:48
right?
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00:24:49
Yeah, I love that.
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00:24:50
Yeah, because I think one, one of the big things that, keeps coming
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00:24:53
up in social media management that sales isn't talking to marketing.
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00:24:57
Marketing isn't talking to revenue.
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00:24:58
Revenue is not talking to sales.
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00:25:00
sales.
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00:25:00
So if you're in sales and your initial push was, we got to sell this product.
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00:25:06
What if they run out?
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00:25:08
What if you've sold so much and you've run out, but if you're not told and
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00:25:11
you keep selling a product that's not available anymore, or you're told to
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00:25:15
market something that sales is Not aware that isn't, being produced anymore.
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00:25:20
Cause there's a problem in shipping.
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00:25:22
That's when you start working in silos, that's when you run into a real problem.
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00:25:26
If you are watching this, listen to this and you've heard this, stop
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00:25:29
working in silos means putting together a team where all the different.
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00:25:33
People from the different teams, the sales, the marketing, the revenue, the
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00:25:38
graphic design, the HR can talk and have a place to talk about everything.
Speaker:
00:25:44
Stacy, we're almost at the end of our half hour.
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00:25:46
This is fascinating.
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00:25:47
I love agility.
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00:25:48
I love being able to use this in the way I work with my clients.
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00:25:54
And I have.
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00:25:55
You to thank for teaching me a lot of this stuff.
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00:25:57
If somebody wants to learn more about agile marketing or about what you do
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00:26:02
and how you help and how you go into companies and help them and coach and
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00:26:06
train, where can people reach you?
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00:26:09
Where are you most active and what's your website?
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00:26:12
Yeah, so our website is navigate agile.
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00:26:17
com and we also have a whole learning library there where you'll see videos,
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00:26:22
articles, all kinds of information.
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00:26:24
So please dig into that or reach out to me at my email, which is Stacey
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00:26:29
with an E Y at navigate agile.
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00:26:31
com.
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00:26:32
Or also LinkedIn.
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00:26:33
I'm pretty active on LinkedIn, Stacey Ackerman.
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00:26:36
And I would love to connect with each and every one of you, answer
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00:26:39
any questions that you have and see how I might be able to
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00:26:42
help you.
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00:26:43
That's awesome.
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00:26:44
I'll make sure to put the link in the show notes.
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00:26:46
So if you're listening to this there should be a link to the website
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00:26:50
for Stacey and go check it out.
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00:26:52
Lots of.
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00:26:53
Lots of videos, like she said, lots of learning to be had.
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00:26:56
And once you wrap your head around agile guys, you're not
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00:26:59
going to do it any other way.
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00:27:01
I can tell you that Stacy, I appreciate you being here today.
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00:27:04
I want to thank everybody who was here watching, listening in and
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00:27:09
special shout out to those who stayed all the way to the end.
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00:27:12
Our podcast listeners.
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00:27:13
Thank you so much.
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00:27:14
I'll be back next.
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00:27:15
We'll see you next week with another episode of Strategy Talks.
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00:27:17
Bye everybody.
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00:27:19
Bye.