When talking about overpowered, overkill tech, I’ll often use an analogy like “we’re using a race car to go to the grocery store”.

As I get deeper into Eloqua, and especially spend time around long time users, the common narrative is that it’s far more powerful and sophisticated than Marketo or other tools, with albeit a steeper learning curve. When I first started using the tool, I was already the race car driver, and figured It’d be like stepping into a slightly different make and model.

But really, switching from one system to the other is like being a pro race car driver, and then switching to flying helicopters. Sure, one may be faster or more efficient than the other, but your previously acquired skills don’t really translate. Maybe that analogy is too strong for this circumstance, but it certainly feels that way some days.

The question is if and when trading the road for the sky pays off.

I’ve worked in a lot of organizations that are BIG on using acronyms internally and externally.

On the one hand, using industry jargon and acronyms may help establish legitimacy for you in the marketplace. For those who do what you do, you suddenly seem like you know what you’re doing.

But I’d argue for as many people who are impressed by your acronym usage, there are just as many bewildered by it. You can alienate in two ways:

1. People literally don’t understand what you mean.
2. You appear inaccessible or overly complex.

I’m not saying don’t ever use acronyms. But just be mindful of who your audience is when using them. Deep industry focused event? Sure. NPR podcast ad? Maybe take a moment to revisit the script.

By the way – this is all thoughts on external use—rarely is acronym usage worthwhile internally. In that case, you’re almost always going to do more harm than help.

lf you only judge your task list just by what’s been added to it—the inflow—it’s easy to get overwhelmed and discouraged. How could you possibly get all these done and get back to an empty list?

But that of course is missing the point. The goal of a good productivity system & to do list is not to cross everything off it. After all, you probably never really run out of work to do. The goal is instead to maintain a balanced inflow/outflow of tasks. To knock out tasks at a rate that keeps the backlog from getting too overgrown.

Whenever I stress myself out about my task list, it’s because I’m obsessing over what’s new to it. It’s easy to look at a huge task list and feel like you aren’t getting anything done. But a quick glance at the “Done” column can be all that’s needed (for me, anyway) to keep it all in perspective.

Whenever you’re working with super smart, capable-seeming people, it’s easy to feel inadequate, and let impostor syndrome set in. Most advice in dealing with this is centered around recognizing that you’re more critical of your deficiencies than other people are – in short, you’re better than you give yourself credit for.

That’s totally true advice, and worth heeding. But there’s another helpful way to look at this – the people around you aren’t as good as you think they are. When we are kids, adults seem to be the ones with all the answers. Yet once we’re adults, there’s still plenty we don’t know.

In the workplace you might feel like some of your work is poor or inadequate – but it’s helpful knowing that everyone else feels the same about their own work. No one really knows what they’re doing – we’re all just good at hiding that fact.

Recognize that this appearance is deceiving before holding yourself to a double standard.

Somedays, like today, it’s pretty hard to get into the headspace to put one of these posts together. If I’ve learned anything over the last 4.5 months of doing this daily, it’s that routine matters. For example, I always write these in the mornings, usually before I start any sort of work. There are some exceptions to that rule, but I’ve learned that I’ll probably fail to make a post at all if I try and convince myself that I’ll be able to “write it later”.

It’s also tough to spin an idea completely out of thin air for a post. I need a backlog. And today is just one of those days that I’m without much of a backlog to work from. Hence why I’m taking the meta route of writing about writing today.

Finally, maintaining this daily habit requires I keep it constantly in the back of my mind. Though the act of writing these takes place in the morning, keeping this effort in mind throughout the day, helps me recognize fruitful topics to explore in the backlog.

So if I’m having a distracted, derailed kind of day, chances are my observation skills will be lacking, and I’ll run into a backlog issue yet again. It’s easy to make this situation seem bigger than it is, and act as if I’m all out of ideas. But really, it’s just a reminder to keep my eyes open.

When launching or even revising a scoring model, the temptation is to solve it in one go. To spend all your effort up front defining the perfect elements to include, and how best to weight them.

There’s nothing wrong with methodical consideration of this stuff, but it tends to get drawn out too long, and the fact is, that it’s hard to know how the model will really perform until you push it live.

Better to build the first stab at the model, and iterate as you have data to suggest performance.

The best thing about this approach is there are always elements of a scoring model that are trickier than others to implement. Product usage, for instance, is usually a tricky variable to score on, at least compared to something like job titles. This is absolutely a variable to consider including in your model, but it’s not necessarily required for day 1. You can get the easy stuff live first, and add in the more in-depth measurements later.

Most of all, once you start getting real data, you start to realize there were variables you didn’t even consider before that now need to be added. No amount of pre-work will make those easier to identify ahead of time.

Kotaku has a great article up about the troubled development of Anthem, a new role playing game from BioWare and EA. Even if you’re not a gamer, it’s a worthwhile read, if only as a cautionary tale of where design and execution can go horribly awry.

But one of the biggest lessons I took away from this article was around decision making, or rather the lack of it.

 Some people disagree on the fundamentals. And then, rather than someone stepping up and making a decision about how to proceed, the meeting would end with no real verdict, leaving everything in flux. “That would just happen over and over,” said one Anthem developer. “Stuff would take a year or two to figure out because no one really wanted to make a call on it.”

It’s easy, especially in an operations and process oriented role like marketing technology, to strive for perfection. To maximize efficiency. But when I look back on some of the biggest failings in my career, they were when I waited around too long for the perfect option to make a decision on.

“Make good decisions” is certainly the goal, but we tend to focus too much on the “good” part of the equation, and less on the “making” part of the process. Often forward action and committing on a course is better, even if that course hasn’t been verified as the most optimal, than making no movement at all.

There are very few actions in business or in life that can’t be reversed if they truly go sour. But failing to take action at all has even worse odds of success.

When you need something from a person on your team—especially someone you don’t speak with super often—the temptation is to start with the small talk before you get into why you’re really reaching out.

But you really ought to consider skipping the pleasantries and getting to the point. Or at least, saving them for after the purpose of your whole interaction.

When you try and fluff up your interaction as innocuous, it’s pretty obvious immediately that you’re after something bigger. The other person is just waiting for the other shoe to drop. At best, you just waste some of their time. At worst, you actually damage the relationship by seeming like a manipulative person, who only says something nice to get something in return.

There’s nothing wrong with small talk & pleasantries—just don’t use them as bait.

If you’re the sort of person who often says “I’m not that sort of person”, you might not be the best judge of what you are or aren’t.

One of the reasons nurture is often found to be ineffective is the lack of effort put into personalization & targeting. Marketers build the basic nurture first, but because it is never yields results, they never bother with the more targeted streams.

In an era where personalization is more talked about than ever, it’s pretty clear that most brands just aren’t willing to put forth the work required to truly get personal. You see the same thing with ABM. We talk about it like it’s this pure, 1:1 experience. Yet most brands ABM efforts look curiously similar and generic to their demand gen brethren. Not to say some aren’t doing great work here, but these are very much the exception to the rule.

We fall short of real personalization and relevance because it’s hard. It’s time consuming. It’s unfamiliar. It doesn’t feel quite enough like the marketing we’re most familiar with. And these are all true. Just remember there’s a difference between actually changing your strategy versus doing what you’ve always done but calling it something different.