Tactics are killing us! Get your strategy straight!

Hey, welcome, it's two o'clock in Texas, which is where I'm coming from live today. So really excited to be here want to thank Nely and Andrew for inviting me to this. You know, I've got some remarks at the end about kind of this whole thing. But really, really excited to talk to you today and dive into what I have seen over the last 20 years working with large companies, small companies, massive companies, global companies in the importance of strategy, and getting away from this, this this tactical way of doing things right. Now we'll have questions and answers at the end. And for everybody playing at home, the chat is over here. So I can't really see what everybody's chatting with. But at the end, I'll pull that over and, and see so I'm going to present to a blank screen. But let's dive in first, who in the heck am I? Ryan Phelan have been in the industry for over 20 years. I'm the co founder of origin email, worked on a tonne of different brands over the last 20 years, worked in a lot of different companies like axiom and blue Hornet and dextra and Sears and responses and all that kind of stuff. So tonne of experience coming in today. Also, I write regularly on marketing landed Mar tech today. But we're gonna have some fun. I don't take myself too seriously. So let's dive in just as a bit of warning. I have a dog. That's him, Pippin. So if the doorbell rings for any reason, he will join this session, barking hysterically. And also at some point my computer may freeze. So if it does, I may not necessarily know about it. I got this bug drivers bad or something in the last few days. And so if I pause dramatically for 20 seconds and then come back. Just assume I didn't say anything. But nothing went wrong. So I'm telling this to Nely so she doesn't look and freak out and think that the whole thing's broken. Right? font is tiny. font is tiny. Make your screen bigger. Chester, I got an I got nothing is better there? Yes, thank you very much. All right, lots of love Chester. Here's what we're going to cover today. Just a few things, taking everybody through this, this idea of a tactical first mindset. And we'll get into what that is in a minute. So first, what what's the challenge, right? What are we all conquering on a daily basis, as consumers but as also as, as deployers of email in mass, right. And, and let's be honest, we're all buried in email. Consumer study that I did a few years ago found that consumers check their email and social media accounts before they do anything. Mainly, like, I don't drink coffee. Right. And so what that challenge for all of us has been is this pile that we get on a regular basis in our inbox. And it's it's, it's overwhelming for many consumers and and and it drives a lot of us nuts personally, is that we have to wade through this, and it is really not going to get much better. In the next six months in the States. We've got an election coming up, right. And if you thought it was crazy last year, it's going to be crazier this year. The for all intents and purposes, the primaries just got over or hopefully will have just got over. So now we only will get emails from our primary candidate and the organising committee or the party, but it's still going to be nuts. And then we go into all the different elections for state and national office and all that kind of stuff. It's gonna get worse and so retailers and us as marketers are gonna have to deal with how do we how do we combat against all the political email? I mean, I wake up in the morning and and frankly, this was a snapshot out of my inbox a couple days ago yesterday. And it's just not I mean, yes, you can tell who I support and Marriotts here he's probably cringing. But, you know, it's crazy the amount of emails that are sent in a day. And if you look at the emails, some of those are two emails at the same time, right. And so I feel like I'm doing Tinder every morning. I mean, I'm married, don't do Tinder, but it feels like it because I'm swiping just to release it. This is my promotional inbox the other day. I mean, a tonne of stuff. And we've got to start changing how we do things. And I think, in my experience, what a lot of it that I've seen is that we're very tactically focused. I mean, think about it, you look at the typical production process. And on the top, what we have is what I left, where an executive or your boss comes down and says, we need to solve for this. This is wrong, right? And, and, and I've got some examples at the end. But you know, so what do you do you identify the challenge, you have a quick meeting, you determine the things you can do, and then you panic, and then you go do it, right. There's really not in this process, strategy, except for what people say, Well, this is my strategy, I got to do something. So I do it. marketers are great. You walk into any meeting, and most marketers next time you're in a meeting in a in a challenge is presented, sit back and listen to everybody and think what you would say. And most times, what you're going to find is people come up with what we can do. That's not necessarily a strategy. It is a tactical execution of trying to solve for a problem. And if you think about the regular promotions, just the regular ba us stuff that we do, it goes from a promotional brief, which a lot of people think is a strategy, but it's not, it's a brief, and then through to design that through the launch, right? There's nothing in here for the marketer to take a step back. And say, I need to think about the strategy of this. And that's that tactical mindset that we have, in that we approach every meeting as a, I can throw this system at it or this person at it, and I can solve it away by assigning duties, right? And it's a, it's a conveyor belt, right? It just happens and propagates over and over and over again, to where we don't even realise it. That's why I'm saying next time you're in a meeting, sit back and listen for a second. And what you'll find is that is that I'm going to solve the problem by throwing bodies or effort at it. And so what I have encouraged companies and people and teams to do for the last 20 years, is have this strategy first mindset. Now, this is a way of life, this extends to everything that you do. But it has to be pervasive across the board into consciously tell yourself, I'm not just going to throw a widget at it, what I'm actually going to do is, is take a step back and think about things a little bit more. Right? So a strategy first mindset goes into your email programme, or a holiday campaign or anything that you're presented at work, but then it also kind of carries over to, to life, right? And not that I'm going to give a motivational speech and get everybody excited about changing their lives. But when you kind of think about the that, that mindset, it affects everything that you do. Because in the grand scheme of things, what wins most times is not the tactic to which you use to accomplish a goal or solve a problem. It's the strategy that you thought about first, to make sure that the goal is successful. Right? Now you're thinking to yourself, I do strategy all the time, I'm gonna, I'm gonna lay out some things that may change that. Right, so hang on with me for just two seconds. But really strategy having a vision is is critically important when I I'm a fractional cmo for a number of companies in and outside of the space. And one of the first things I do when I walk into a company is I look at their tactics, I look at what they're doing. And I also ask them, what's your strategy? What's your overarching strategy that you have, and they'll struggle with it a bit. Mostly it centres on we want to sell a lot of stuff and we want to talk about ourselves a lot. And I spend generally the first month or if there's less time, I can do it less time, but I spend that amount of time with them per month walking through what are your unique selling points, what is your voice? What is your target market? What is you know, I just did one for a company and the document itself when we get done and we outlined everything because what you want a strategy in a fractional cmo world what you want a strategy to do is is be a playbook for the next 12 months. The document was 30 pages long, because we needed to talk about all the different things that we need to use at our disposal the levers that we need to pull. But you can't do that by coming up with this a theory, oh, hey, I want to make money and I want people to talk about it, you have to really dive into why do they want to talk about you? Who wants to talk about you and what I want to talk about? Right? It's the same way in email campaigns or email programmes, you need to sit back and think about it. And not just hope that it's going well, I've met a lot of marketers that I'm like, Why did you say that is said that? They're like, well, I hoped it would work. And it's like, well, hope. And Lauren MacDonald was great at this years ago, used to have an I stole this slide. So I'm stealing the slide from Lauren. But he had this hope is not a strategy. And it's true, right? How many times we push the send button, and thought two things, number one, I hope there were no errors. And two, I hope this works. And that's the that's the wrong side of the coin that you that you want to be at. So now that we've talked about the need for it, right? Let's define what a strategy first mindset is. And it's the exercise of discovering the why before assigning the how most of us come in to a problem. And the tactical mindset is the how, how are we going to solve it? How, what kind of list are we going to get? What system are we going to use? Who can do this? Who's going to prove it? What does it do to our production schedule? How fast do you need it? All those how questions are great. But you want to start with the why questions? You want to start with questions like this, right? Why should the customer care? Why should they give a darn about what you're doing? Why is this going to solve the challenge? Why do I need to send an email? Why do I need only send one? Maybe I need to send more? Why do I care? Right? We all need to be motivated? Why should I believe in this? And then what's the reason to believe for the end user? All of those are critically important for us? Because Listen, how many times have you answered this before starting a programme versus starting on an email processor? or been in a meeting where you step back and ask those questions. And from prior experience, what I found is that rarely happens. Right? And so what I want to encourage everybody to do, I mean, the decks available, you can email me and I'll send it to you. But these types of questions take a screenshot the baby's priceless, right? But ask those why questions when you're in a in a meeting, right? Either yourself or, or afterwards, because here's what you want to do with it. You want to create for everything you do. I know I'm adding more work to your plate. But listen to me for a minute, just a second, I want you to start building a strategy brief for everything. Now that goes for your weekly emails that goes for your crisis emails that goes for your winback programme that goes for everything, right? In my line of business as a fractional cmo. As a strategist, I write hundreds if not 1000s of these in my career, right. Now, what is it do it is incredibly effective to define what you want to accomplish and define the Y statements. Right? Now, when you get trained on this, when you get it is muscle memory. These things only could should take you 30 to 45 minutes. Realistically, I can crank one out in about a half hour, because I'm so used to writing these, right. And you can get that way too, the first time you do it, it'll probably struggle a little bit. And Heck, if you need my help it reach out to me and I'll help, right. But if you get into a template that defines all these things, then it makes it easier for you to answer the questions. So it starts with an overview, right starts with having an overview of what you're trying to accomplish. It's a one sentence kind of a thing of, hey, we're trying to solve for abandoned shopping carts. Right? If you have stats to put in that great, you want to present kind of an overview next, what is the reason to believe? And that reason to believe is answering those white questions. Why does and frankly this one? Why does the customer give a damn about what you're doing? What you're gonna send? What you come up with? This is also the BS test, right? Is the idea that you just came up with emailing because you're emailing or emailing because it serves a purpose and solves a problem. Right? So the reason to believe moment is that reason for the customer to believe that what you're doing solves the problem. Next purpose and goal of the project. What do you hope to accomplish? What challenges are you solving? dive into this? These are not short answers either. You can't just answer each of these with one sentence and go for it. You have to assume that you're giving this to your boss's boss. Trust me, your boss's boss doesn't have the granularity that you have, your boss probably doesn't have the granularity that you have. But you have to describe it in such a way that not to go on and on and on. But basically, to really flush out your thoughts so that you can describe this perfectly to everybody involved. Because this brief becomes the start of everything. You pass this out to the team. And and I'll go over the process here in a minute. But this is kind of the Bible of whatever you're going to do. Next, who's the audience? Who are you going to serve? What segments out of your database are you looking for? Or what cohorts are you looking for? What's the definition of who the audience is? Now, this is important because it defines who the audience is, and who the audience isn't. And we have an example later on in the presentation about how not having not defining who the audience isn't, will, can kill you write. So define your audience, define the theme and voice. And that changes for every message. You have a brand voice and a brand equity, but you also have a theme, does it fit into your regular process? Does it have a different voice? Is the voice urgent? Is it helpful? Is it is it forgiving? Shoot, I don't know. But what's the voice you're going after in this, this helps with your copy decks, it helps with your headlines, it helps with all kinds of things, right? And then next, then you get in to the execution steps, what are the things you have to do on the execution side, this is where you can get into the tactical, Mary is going to pull this and and George is going to be charged with design. And when he's done, Harry is going to run a three mil on acid, and you know all those kind of things that are execution steps. That's something you can template sometimes, too. If you have set roles or set ways of doing things, then you're just going through and changing a couple words, right? But the most work you're going to do on this is the first section of these. Right? And then when you're done that, oh, sorry, what you can also do testing, what do you also do is optional elements, right? And this, I use this sparingly dependent upon the the use case, or what's being asked, I'll put in what my testing scenarios are, right? I'll put in a raci, of who's responsible for what and if, again, back to if you have very assigned teams, then you can fill out one raci. And it lasts forever. And you may have to, you know, add one in every once in a while. What's your innovation arc? What's your innovation piece to this? Is it video and email? Is it real time email? Are you going at Campaign genius and pulling in some dynamic content? Are you trying some new tool? What is that? Right? Cost costs? Are there any extra costs that are going to be incurred? Right, you have to use an outside source outside party, your agency going to have to add it on with an Esso W is there technical work that needs to be done whatever. And then trade offs. These are very important. Having worked in hyper crazy, insane retail trade offs are important. So if I do this, then I can't do that. You want to define those things upfront so that when you pass this around people know, hey, if I do this project, then I may be late with this one, or this programme may be pushed back or whatever. What are the implications of doing this programme? then when you're done when you've got this all wrapped up, and everybody's using it as the manual for this programme, go back when you're done, and update it with results? Right. One of the things that's lacking in this industry is marketers who actually document things. I wrote an article on marketing land a few months ago, talking about how one of the biggest gaps is we turn over so fast in this industry, one to two years, right. When the new person comes in, the old person has either left the company or in another position and too busy with that one. They can't mentor that person. And so there's a lack of documentation on testing, reporting, these kind of things. Strategy briefs, also help your next person who runs this programme, to get up to speed on what you've already done. And that's what we owe is marketers to the next person is that leg up, because one of the things we've seen with innovation in the email space, is that we're, we're confined because that new person moves on and the new the old person moves on the new person comes in and starting from scratch. Right? So the strategy brief also allows you to have a container for the solution. How many times have we ever started something and it's like, No, we want to do this and no this change? It asks, How many questions do you get on a regular basis? How much time does the questions and emails take to fill out and respond back to I bet it's longer than it would take you to fill out a strategy brief. That's the power of this is you contain in that strategy brief a container for everything you're doing everything this project is going to have and it makes it a whole big box to stick stuff in and it also makes sure that people don't stick other things In, right, and plus, if you have somebody that's minor on the team, you give them that strategy brief, they'd now fully understand your thinking and the direction you want to go. So they can check themselves against them. So that's one thing you guys can do. Right? Do the strategy briefs, and I have some, I see some questions going on over there. And I see Kate's here, I, Kate, and a whole bunch of my other friends. And that's great. I'll get to that in a second. But I'll also get to q&a here in a second to next I want to talk to you a strategy first mindset also extends into what I call strategy days. Strategy days are this. They're intense, kind of laying the groundwork, laying the track for where you're going to go for the next year. And yes, I know, stuff comes up screaming down the hall moments, it derails you all the time. But it's important once a year, and then once a quarter, to do a strategy day, right? once a year, what I encourage my clients to do and have for a long time, is to have one day at the beginning of the year where you all do an exercise, I'm going to define that a second. And then on every quarter, you have a check in maybe it's an hour, maybe it's two hours, and you measure yourself against that. But strategy days are incredibly important. And this doesn't mean just email marketing, this should reach across every discipline. Anywhere, right? Whether you're tech, whether you're Ops, whether you're management, whether you're whatever, you need to have this because it focuses everybody, and here are the rules. And I've done these for hundreds of companies over the last 20 years. And they're phenomenal. They're great 232, or three, three day or two or three, two day sessions. And I tell you what, everybody walks around with it like now I've got my path, right, I know where I'm going. So strategy days start like this. And this is an abbreviated schedule, right. But first, get everybody outside of the office, rent something somewhere, a room at a restaurant, or somewhere out of your general vicinity of your office, if you have a huge campus, then try and get some of the conference centre stuff. If you're in a small office, try and get budget to go and rent. Shoot, we had one a year ago with a company I work with, and it was at Top Golf. They have little rooms, right? They weren't it wasn't that bad. But get it off site. And that's a distraction piece. Also, when people walk in the room, have them lay their phones on the table by the door. Now listen, there's exceptions, if you're an executive or the house is on fire, or your wife is going to have a baby soon or something like that, then yes. Okay, make exceptions. But put the distractions away. Because how many times have we been in meetings and you see people, you know, playing with your phone under here, you know, to clear chance of I'm bored. Right? So you want to remove those distractions, then take some time to review. Where have you been? What has happened in the last year, the highs, the lows, the successes, the great things, right, go over those. Those are for presentation, not necessarily discussion, because what you want to avoid in these is the rabbit hole of death. Right? People getting into a tactical discussion about how Mary screwed up this email, and then everybody got upset, we don't need to relive it, what we do want to do is review it, then discuss the challenges you currently face. And by the way, all of these agenda items should have a time limit on them. And you should hold very tight to that time limit. And you yourself should discipline yourself to pull people back on track to make sure you keep on time and that people don't slip down the rabbit hole because that's what I spend most of my time in these meetings doing is making sure number one guiding the presentation in the in the discussion, but making sure that people don't get off track. Right. So discuss the challenges currently face and this is homework that you can give people before they show up. But what's the disconnect from the end user? What's the lack of data sophistication, tools? Start a list, right? You may solve these things during that but at least you've identified them. Then do a what I what is commonly called I don't call it with a company called Blue Sky exercise. Which is okay, what do we want to do this year period. And then you just start writing stuff on a whiteboard. Any idea you can think of, and you as the organiser should come with some pretty goofy ideas. Because you want people to start thinking outside of any box they've ever thought of. Right? Come with some legitimate ones things that you know need to get done. But come at this with the goofy ones to give people the freedom to be goofy to be silly to do whatever. Then ban any ideas around tactical restrictions. This is a key thing because one of the things I see happen is something He will say, we need to, I want to, I want to do a six part onboarding programme, and somebody will perk up and go, our ESP can't do that. That's tactical, we're talking about blue sky. Blue Sky means that budget doesn't exist, that the operations don't exist, the platform's don't exist, it means you're just trying to figure out what you want to do, then you start to get a little bit more deeper now you prioritise based on value, and effort. How much How valuable is that to your, your, your end user? How valuable is that to revenue are your KPI. And then you start to rate them, right, you start to force rank them. And then what you do is prioritise on effort. Now we're into the tactical, now we're into how much of how much time is this going to take to do it, by the end of that, hopefully, what you walk away with is a consensus on what we need to focus on for the year, these are our pillars, these are the things and don't get too far ahead of yourself, it's good to define two or three things you want to accomplish with a reserve of four or five. And if you get to the two or three, you're great, it's been my experience that most marketers, if they get to one, they have won the game, right, with all the stuff going on all the screaming down the hall moments, you get to one year good. So keep this realistic about what you want to do. And that's for you, not necessarily the team, you can tell them, Hey, we're gonna draw the line here. And if we get it done great. Always remember, you can always work ahead, if you really get ahead of things, right. And then some of the things I've done with clients is I build a chart like this. And and there's a lot of explanation to this. But basically, what you do is you you build a grid, and you start to rank all those programmes that people came up with on a on an access of lifetime value, or ROI. And then your opinion or your shared opinion as a team as as it pertains to relevancy, how relevant is this message, because we all know, the more relevant we have a message, the better it will perform transactional messages and triggers incredibly effective and relevant, right, and they get some great ROI. And so what you try to do is start mapping this out. And this will tell you easily, which ones you should be thinking about, because the upper right quadrant is the stuff that's not only really effective, but going to make your KPI numbers and going to be a value in service to your customer base. Right. So something like this can actually help structure your thoughts and your thinking. And so it should work. And yes, I just I peeked over here to make sure I wasn't like in error and buttons and gestures that also ban laptops, can't tell you thank you gesture, I can't tell you how important that is. Closed laptops, not on the table not making any noise, iPads the same way, you will give breaks, right? If this is an eight hour day with an hour for lunch, give breaks for people to check their devices. But don't let people take notes on the computer. If you have to find somebody that you can borrow from another department and they can be the note taker or bring along somebody, whatever. But let them take notes, don't you or your team take notes. Because why not notes. Because that falls into the tactical mindset people get distracted. And the person taking notes is not listening to the discussion. So let's dive in and examples. Let me do a time check to 30 freakin fantastic. Okay, let's look at some examples of where I think attacked or a strategic approach would have served them better than a than what I feel is a tactical approach. Right? Now I'm going to do a disclaimer. I don't know the behind the scenes of any of this, right? All I know, is my appearance as a consumer getting these emails going. Are you kidding me? Right? That's all I got. So if you're on the, if you're listening to me, and you're a part of these companies, email me and tell me I'm wrong. But I'm telling you from a consumer standpoint, I looked at these and went, What the heck are you talking about? Okay, first, let's address the elephant in everybody's living room everywhere is COVID-19 messages. I don't know about you. But I got two things for these messages. Number one, you can tell a true email geek, if they have a separate folder where they're putting all of these in, I gotta tell you, I shuffle them in there, because I'm going to use them at some point. And I want to see what they're all about. I don't delete them, save them all. If you're like that, you're an email geek. Second thing is and I wrote about this yesterday in a marketing marketing land article about virtue signalling, and about how some of these messages didn't need to be sent at all. Now Bank of America it's a bank, but I pretty much assume that I'm not going to go in the bank. I'm gonna use the ATM and if I have a question, I'm gonna call but they sent this right. And a lot of these are like we're concerned about you and we're doing What you probably assume we're going to do in the first place, right? The strategy on this and I don't know what it was, a lot of people, I think are doing it because everybody's doing it. And I'm going to do it too. But I've consulted with a bunch of companies in the space, and I've actually advise some of them. You don't need to send it like SAS companies. There's no reason to send it. Really no one cares, right? Unless there's an overriding thing where God I gotta send it, but this is that bs metre. And that's in the strategy brief, right? The bs metre, the reason to believe metre, is for you to kind of figure out Do I need to send it? Right, and I look at this, and I go, I didn't really need this. I look at this one from food 42 this is probably the one that drove me the craziest because and not only sent this one, but they send like to others about it. And one said, this is a very sad time. Yes, it's a very sad time. But your food 52 I don't need to hear that from you. For Gosh, gosh sakes. This one was ridiculous. Didn't need to be in there. I don't I don't care that your people are working from home. I really don't. Your food. 52. Love you for the recipes. You got some cool writing? I really don't care. Right? How many of these messages have we received? Where you read it? And you're like, I really don't care. And at this point, let's be honest. We're not read any of them, because we've gotten so many of them. So this virtue signalling of I'm virtuous. I'm special. I'm doing what everybody else is doing. Is it is is a is an email bereft of a strategy. I don't know what the strategy here is. can't figure it out. And I've thought about Safeco insurance, right. They don't have offices around here. They have their app, and they have a phone. Right. And again, I assume you've probably sent people home I don't need to know about it doesn't make me feel better about Safeco insurance, you're my car insurance company. You know what people do with insurance. They only worry about it if they have to change or if they get an accident. So at that point, I'm going to assume I could pick up the phone call, you are going to use this cool app. But there are no offices around here. So let's get to the safecoat. There the COVID thing, let's go to an oops, email. How many of us is bad to send an oops email? I'll tell you, I talk companies out of these about 75% of the time. And I'll tell you why. Because most times, you don't have to send them. And if you send them we all know, if you put oops, in the subject line, guess what happens? People open it. And now they know you made a mistake. Right? Now this one I actually looked at, I looked at my prior history of getting Hilton emails, and they hadn't emailed me for five months. And then I got this one. And then they emailed me once a month, and then they did nothing. Now there were bookings in there, too. I don't know why I got this, I don't care. But they sent two emails that said they send a mistake, and then they send a third. So now this mistake has cost me another email that I'm worthless about. And I probably didn't care about the first two. Now, I don't know if they got about service calls and felt they needed to do this. But maybe send it to people that you've emailed, or open the email or something. Right, I shouldn't have gotten this email. I hadn't heard from him for five months. This again, an email without a strategy that I can't figure out. If I had been getting regular emails, maybe I got those two, maybe, but didn't even get the two. Next Uber Eats. Here's another one. They sent an email didn't have a subject line. Then they sent an email with a subject line that said, oops, makes you shake your head. Right? Again, no strategy here. Do we need to send this? Is this a good strategy? Is that does the customer actually care? I don't know. I'm gonna say I didn't really care. Now, next, b2b is not immune. This is not a strategy. This is just spam. I signed up for this guy's thing. Seemed like a cool tool. I signed up for it, use it a couple times realised they didn't like it. I got so many friggin emails, I kept getting the emails just because I wanted to see how long it went. And then by the fourth of october of 2018, I gave up. I was like, I can't handle it anymore. It's too many. But this is again, there's no strategy here. There's no thought of does the customer care? Why am I doing this? What is it a goal accomplished? What goal what, what data do I have to inform this? Nothing. This is I'm a b2b company and I have marketing automation at my fingertips. And I'm going to send these emails because it can. Sad, very, very sad. This one is probably the pinnacle of a strategy that missed its mark. Remember when I talk to you about data and segments. This is important. Now I've been married. For a long time, I've not been on OkCupid for seven years. Before I was married, let's all be straight about this. Don't need my wife getting angry. She's upstairs. So I had not ever logged in, I can't remember the last time I logged in. They sent me a happy birthday email in 2016. Now, seven years before that hadn't been on, I am married, I could get in trouble for this. They didn't think about their data. They didn't think about, hey, maybe people that haven't been in the email or haven't logged in a long time, we shouldn't send this email. Right. Maybe this was some glorified wind back programme? I don't know. But as a person that hasn't been logging in or opened any of your emails for seven years. Would you send it? Right? It's these. Think about the strategy behind it. And it's solved by thinking about the strategy first. And I give one more example, on a programmatic standpoint, one of the things of programme strategy first, this is a real life. Kind of an example of a strategy session I did and I developed this kind of system back at axiom. I still use it a little bit today. But But back to that, that box chart, right? This is an exercise where we listed out their current programmes a company's current programmes. And they were concerned because they weren't getting response. They weren't getting sales, they're, you know, they were seeing some decreases. And they were like, why is that? And so we did this exercise where we mapped out what they currently had in place. And what we found was, well, you don't have any really high value. programmes that speak to loyalists or influencers, you don't have a lot of stuff that speaks to converters, or you know, any of that kind of stuff, you're pretty much bottom of the funnel kind of activity. And so work with them over a two day period, doing the same kind of exercise that I talked to you guys about earlier. And so we went from this, to this was going to be their plan for the coming year, right, all those things in kind of the reddish boxes for the programmes they were going to put in place. And so having that strategy, they has this kind of an effect, where you can walk away and go, Okay, I'm going to develop these programmes, and we stack rank these and, and we're able to accomplish everything we wanted to accomplish in the year. But because we took that strategy timeout, and we had regular check ins throughout the quarters to make sure they were on track, they were able to get way ahead of where they were, and start to see the arrow going up instead of the arrow going down. Right now I understand. This does not happen overnight. But dedicate yourself to asking why. Right? Start doing it, get muscle memory for it, because it's incredibly important to do this, because number one, it's how we make our programme smarter. It's how we advance our careers. And and gosh, it just makes sense, right? And nobody can tell me you don't have a half hour that you can pull out of answering all the stupid emails and comments and put it into a strategy brief. It's a trade off. Right? So let's wrap up real quick. And then I'll get to q&a and look over to that screen. But so start to ask why evolves slowly if you want to get used to it, start sending strategy emails? do it don't do it a doc, do it an email that just kind of kind of defines your thought, right? And then you'll find that it's easier to go into a dock and why do you want it in the dock because a dock can't get deleted a doc is a permanency it's a it's a it's a it's a almost a thought process to have it as a formal document, right, that raises the bar. Record the results of the effort, I can't emphasise how important that is to record the results in that brief so you can reference it and and create a catalogue and then hold a strategy day. And and you know as much time especially then getting the year right, hold that strategy day get out of the office is incredibly important and motivate your team because they think that they can be listened to. But it also sets the path for the next year and then have regular check ins on a quarterly basis. Ah, Alright, with that said, let's get over to QA and I'll drag this window over here so I could see whatever be sent. Hey, Matt, you're here. Everybody's here. All the friends are here. Yes, I probably had a typo. If you haven't watched me in the last 20 years, you know that. Thank you, Chester, Nely, I have time I have tonnes of time. That was just the end of my stuff. Make it a PDF, make it a PDF? Yes. Take the document, make it a PDF. Let's see. Any questions anybody has? Right. We've got shoot we've got 15 minutes till the next session. Nely is telling me to wash my hands and to answer questions. So while people are thinking a question I'm gonna PRL myself by the way, thought of this today. Random thinking if we're supposed to use pure L and these kind of things to wash your hands, what's the last thing we touched before we got the PRL? What is this become? It becomes a hotbed of germs. So while you're washing your hands, make sure to also wash the bottle in which your stuff came from. Okay, now that I've freaked everybody out, can I share my template? Yes. If you send me an email, let me get to the slide. If you send me an email to Ryan p at Origin Email, com, I will send you a sample template. And it's pretty easy. I'll anonymize everything and yes, exactly, exactly. I will send you a template. And then if you want to have a short conversation, we can schedule some time and happy to walk you through what a finished one looks like. But Any other questions? Oh, cool. I'll pass it to now. And Nely, and she can do it too. If nobody has any questions, Kate, by the way, Miss you terribly, you need to come back to the states and visit us all your way too far away. And, by the way, she's brilliant. If you didn't get her session the other day, you need to find it ask Nely where it is. Find it and watch it. In fact, I'm going to say this before everybody leaves the room. Don't leave the room yet. Yes, I know, clean all things. I want to first and I'm going to ask everybody's participation on this the 20 people we got in the room. I have been doing conferences for the last 20 years. I and I sent a note to Nely about this yesterday. I shuddered at the fact of doing an online thing, right? Because they all have sucked in the past. And I want to if we were in a real conference, I would say everybody give him a round of applause. I think what what Andrew and Nely have done with this virtual conference in a short period of time and thrown this together with a cancellation London vendor the reschedule right, they have done an amazing job. So I want to have everybody in the chat window, just say yay or thanks or whatever to Nely and Andrew and give them props because they, for the first time in 20 years, this is the best one I've ever been to. So I know they've had a whole bunch of you know, goofy stuff going on from time to time, but they've done a phenomenal job. So big props out to both of those and all the speakers I will tell you they are the speakers that we've seen yesterday, today and tomorrow have been spot on I think there has been stuff I've even learned and and props to all the speakers for really putting some effort into this and, and for all of you for for attending. So with that said, thank you so much for coming, and enjoy the rest of the time and don't forget there's a session tomorrow and, and all that stuff. So thanks to all my friends who showed up. Matthew and and shoot everybody's kind of scrolling by. So Matt, Matt and Matt and everybody else. So thank you so much. And I'm gonna sign off bye