Issue #150: Don’t fall in love your own ideas

When you’re in the business of prescribing solutions, you need to make sure you are taking your own medicine.

And I’m taking a dose of it right now.

At InvisiblePPC, we have a phone, email, and text follow up sequence for anyone who answers one of our Facebook ads but does not book a meeting. As you might expect, responses aren’t phenomenal for any of the sequences. It is “barely warm” follow up after all.

But responses to text messages are nearly non-existent.

Yet text messages aren’t our problem.
They’re just a symptom.

I have a principle of not falling in love with our own ideas. But unless you have an active, ongoing process for vetting, testing, and potentially dumping EVERY idea then you may find yourself married to some bad ones.

Vetting: before implementing an idea make sure you’ve thoroughly examined it, made a list of the pros and cons, and more importantly, ran it by somebody in your organization that you trust.
Testing: you have to do some measure of objective testing, be it A/B tests, historical performance, or some KPI that allows you to judge whether an idea is working or not.
Dumping: this is far and away the hardest step to follow. No one wants to admit that their idea failed. But it’s also the most critical step. It’s where you separate the wheat from the chaff.

This isn’t easy. You may find yourself going through a few cycles of this process before you realize you have a problem. We have this process in place yet it took multiple cycles for us to see that our text messaging was an issue. But stick to it so you don’t end up wedded to the wrong ideas.

Talk to you next week,

Issue #150: Don’t fall in love your own ideas

Avi

CEO & Chief Wizard