Using review sessions
It is important that you also put a date in the diary to review progress. Set a meeting with your team (or if you work alone then instead set a meeting with a friend, mentor or willing family member) as a date to review progress on implementing your marketing plan so far. Having this date set in the diary works a little like having an immovable event. It gives accountability, and will often cause a flurry of work in the days leading up to it so that people have something to report back on. If you are working to a deadline that you cannot miss (such as an event lined up) then have a couple of these review sessions planned so that you can troubleshoot or pick up on things that are falling behind. When I’ve worked on large projects for equally large companies I might have had a weekly review session with a manager block-booked at the same time every week. This gave a structure for them to report back to me and for me to report back to them in a spirit of collaboration until the project was complete. Tie the review sessions to individual goals. If you think that your new website should be finished by a specific date, then set a review session for the morning after that date.
Use review sessions as a positive – use them to celebrate milestones and use them to allow people to take accountability. If something needs completing by a particular date, and everyone knows that, then someone will create pressure on themselves to make sure it happens, rather than come to the next review as the only one who hasn’t done what they needed to. If you are working as a team also use reviews to finish tasks. Something like “You haven’t been able to go through our database yet to pull out the customer’s email addresses that we’d set the goal of today to have? Well, how about you spend the hour we were going to have doing a review doing that now instead?” has been a favourite of mine to get a lingering task ticked off.
Once you know what needs to be done, and once you have planned out how and when you are going to do it, all that stands between you and a successful business is… doing it.
