7.2 What's next for you and AI? - Video Tutorials & Practice Problems
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<v ->All right, so as we think</v> about what's next for you, it's time to return to your course project and really finish it, complete it, put your plan together. This is your moment to do that so that you can get that plan approved by whatever decision maker you've had in mind. And so let's look at the last step in that strategy process, which is to define your plan. So ask yourself, do you have tasks in the plan for a reaction you need to take? So you have a task identified for the gaps that you came up with previously to overcome the obstacles? Are the estimates realistic? So really give your plan a going over. And let's go deeper on that and really think about how your plan needs to be laid out. So don't skimp on the details. The details of the plan are actually what everybody's going to be looking for because anybody can cook up a spreadsheet and say hey, this is gonna happen. If we just got 3% of the market. You don't wanna do that. What you wanna do is to come up with something that's bottoms up, that is really detailed and believable, and in order to get this plan approved, what you're gonna wanna do is to actually shop it around to all of the organizations that have to do something in the plan. So whatever tasks you have in there, whoever in your organization is responsible for that task, you want to show this plan to them before you take it to the decision maker. So you wanna be very specific about what their responsibilities are and what you expect from them, and what the timeframe will be. And if you spell it out, then what you're gonna get is that they will object to it. They will tell you they can't do it. And you could choose to be depressed when they do this but I want you to pick a different reaction, and the reaction is to start taking notes. What are they objecting to? Why can't they do it? Is it they don't have resources? Do they need to hire another person? Is there another project that you would need to be de-prioritized for them to do it? Is there training their people need in order to be able do it? What is it that they need in order to be able to do the thing you've laid out for them? Because guess what? If you can get them to agree that if they had that obstacle overcome, that they'd be able to do it, now you have the list of the things you have to ask the decision maker for when your plan needs to be approved. If you can just get one extra person in department A, if you can get a little more training for the people in department B, they agree that they can execute this plan. That's what you really need to do. You shop this around to all the different organizations, and you make sure that you catalog all of their objections, and then you figure out how to overcome them, and that's what your ask is for the decision maker. As you shop this around, you're gonna find that there are different motivations for different teams. There are gonna be different arguments you need to use to persuade them. So the business team is gonna generally be motivated by the same types of things, no matter what their titles are. They're gonna care about missed opportunities. So places where we didn't get sales, they're gonna care about what revenue you're going to bring in, what the costs are, and they really wanna see that you have a credible plan. Now, on the other hand, if you're talking to lawyers, you might be working in a regulated industry or it could be that in your business, your executives really care about the lawyers evaluating certain types of risks. Well, the problem with lawyers is that they usually say no almost as a reflex. Now, the reason they do that is not cause they're bad people, it's because we've actually set up the motivations poorly. What has happened here is that if a lawyer approves something and something goes wrong, the lawyer gets blamed. But if a lawyer says no, and you don't get to do your project, the lawyer doesn't get blamed for anything. And if the lawyer approves something and it goes well, does the lawyer get credit for it? No, you do. And so the lawyers have no motivation to say yes to anything. And so what you wanna do is to figure out how you can show them that the risk is kind of low, and that you have ways of mitigating the risk. They love mitigation. So definitely throw some mitigation in there. And if they still disagree, then you might need to kind of go over their head. So catalog what all their objections are, and then in the meeting, you have to address them with the executive that you're having this discussion with. Who are you getting to approve this? They might just have to accept the risk that the lawyer is identifying. But do you get the attention of the executive? How can you get her to look up from her phone and pay attention to the plan that you have? How do you get her to really focus on what you want? Well, I can give you one guess and it's money. If you can show how your plan is gonna lead to return on investment, and remember, that's one of the things we had you put in your plan. That's the way to get executive attention. Now, when you get into the meeting, there's gonna be 10 questions that's on your executive's mind. Now, he or she might not ask all of those questions but they're definitely gonna be thinking about them, so what I'm telling you is these are the 10 questions you need to address. The first one is basically what is this and why do I care? Give them the elevator talk that lets them see exactly what this is and why it's important. The second question is maybe a little bit more challenging but it doesn't have to be as hard as we usually make it. Your executive actually tells you exactly what the corporate goals are every year. In the beginning of the year, there's some kind of kickoff meeting, all hands meeting in which they lay out, here are the top priorities for the year. Now, do you go to the meeting? Or if you go are you just kind of doing your emails and not paying attention? This is actuality a really important meeting for you. You should be writing down what these goals are because this is the way to hook the executive when you wanna pitch them something. And you should be able to explain how your AI project is going to fit into these corporate goals. How does it work? Because if you can't show them how it fits with their current corporate goals, maybe you shouldn't be doing this project. So if you can show them how it fits one or even two or three of them, that's gonna get the executive's attention. Third thing to do is to find out where do you stand today? So what is your baseline? So remember we started with the strategy of saying here's what the current situation is. Executives always want to know that. Four, what are your competitors doing? Now, you might say well, our competitors aren't doing AI. So if I tell them that, they're gonna think that we don't need to do it. No, that's not true. This question works whether your competitors are ahead of you or whether they're not. And the reason is because executives are really competitive people. They had to be competitive in order to work their way to the top of the organization, and so think about how they wanna beat the competition. So you're either gonna tell them the competitors are ahead us, and so we need to do this in order to catch up. Or you're gonna tell us that this is our chance to really lap the competitors. We're gonna get so far ahead of them, they're not even gonna be able to see us. And so whatever you do, tell them what the competitors are doing and tell them how this is gonna help the executive to win. Next one's what are you proposing to do? So what is the exact idea in very simple terms? And six is what business value do you expect to achieve? Seven is what does it cost? Eight is how long it takes. You should have answers for all these questions with your return on investment business case and your project plan. Nine is a question that even if they don't ask it, they're thinking about it. Why should I fund this project over current projects? There's no new money. You have to show them why this is a higher priority of other things they're doing. And guess what. When you went and shopped this around to all the departments, you might find out that over and over again, three different departments told you that there's this other project that's really not going well, that's sucking up all their resources. Well, if you can tell them hey, if you could just de-prioritize this project, all these groups could be able to do this. That would free up budget money for you as well. And the last one is what are the risks? And here's where it's important that you bring up all the concerns that the lawyer has. In fact, what you should do in this meeting is not have the meeting one on one with the executive but bring all those departments in, including the lawyer, and have them sitting in the meeting because that way, they can tell the executive yes, if you did all these things, then we could do this project. Let the lawyer object to it right in front of you. It's better to do that because at least you can respond in front of the executive, instead of the executive having to go find the lawyer later and having the lawyer object when you're out of earshot. And so get everybody there that's supporting your plan but also get everybody there that's not because you want the executive to override those people that are still objecting. Okay, you might say, but you don't know my boss. She never does anything new. Well, here's the thing. You're a marketer so you know how to handle people who have certain objections. The people who don't do anything new are usually fear based. They're usually afraid of making a mistake. So as a marketer, how you approach people that are fear based? Well, it's actually pretty simple. What you do is you scare them worse about not doing anything. So scare them about how the company's gonna be left in the dust if we don't tackle AI. All of our competitors are gonna figure this out. There's gonna be new tech companies that compete with us that have this figured out that are gonna beat us bloody, and this is what you have to do is scare them about standing still. So if you scare them about standing still worse than they're afraid of change, now you've got a situation, which you can get this executive to do something new. Now, in the end, you really have to simplify the plan. So now that you're ready, take some stuff out of it. Make it shorter, make it simpler. It's tempting to throw in everything but don't because it just makes things too complicated. You don't wanna be selling past the sale. So don't throw in so much stuff that you give people more questions to ask. Pick the highlights and think about your particular decision maker. What is it gonna take to persuade him or her? Finally, when you're in the meeting, it's time to close the deal. What do you ask your executive for? Well, obviously, you ask them to approve the project and the funding, and the resources but most people don't realize they should be asking for more. So what you wanna ask them to do is to order the extended team to cooperate. Make sure that the executive gives them marching orders that says this is a really important project for me. But the last thing to do is something that you might not wanna do. The last thing to do is that you wanna ask to meet with the executive every week, every month, whatever the right period of time is for your project to review the progress. And you might say to yourself, oh, I absolutely don't want that. I was afraid enough to come in here and pitch this plan. I do not want to see her every month telling her how the project's going. Well, you're wrong. You absolutely do wanna see her every month and here's why. The reason your project won't go well usually has nothing to with you. It has to do with all those people that are sitting in the room, pledging that they're gonna get this done. Usually something else comes up, something goes wrong that the person that they were gonna have to do this quit, and they don't have a replacement yet. And so what you want is for all of those things to actually get surfaced. So you wanna be able to use this as a bludgeon against those people not doing their job. You wanna say hey, look, I know that you have these problems but if you don't get this work done on time, I have the meeting with Shirley on the 17th and I'm gonna have to tell her the project's red and it's because your team isn't doing their job. I don't wanna have to tell her that. What can we do to get you back on track so I don't have to tell her that? And that's gonna help you head off a lot of problems. But there will be some situations in which the team really can't do what they're supposed to do. Maybe they did have a person quit and maybe there's a hiring freeze now, and they can't hire another person. Well, you wanna bring this to the boss in your monthly meeting and say hey, you could fix this. You could grant an exception to the hiring freeze and get that team back on track. So whether you're using the meeting as a threat to people so that they're not de-prioritizing your project or whether there's actually a legitimate issue that you need the boss to clear, by having this meeting, you're gonna keep your project on track. Hey, you made it. You got through this whole course. So congratulations to you 'cause I know there was a lot here and I know that you did a lot of work on your project to do this. So here's what you can do now. First of all, connect with me, find me on LinkedIn. You can connect with me. I'm happy to expand my network with all the people that are doing the kind of exciting work you are. But I'm also gonna make an offer to you. Check out that email address on the bottom of this slide. It says mike+pearson@solosegment.com. So that's the company I work with, SoloSegment. If you put mike+pearson into your email address, I will know that you took this class. And so you can ask me any question you want about this course or about anything else that you're running into in marketing, even three years from now. And so I don't care what the question is. If you put that in the email address, I will see that email, and I will answer your question. And in fact, I'll make you an even better offer. You can show me your plan. I'll take a look at it. I'll give you feedback. I'll help you see if there's something that I think is unclear or if you have a specific question about something about your plan, send it to me. I'd be happy to look at it. I really want you to succeed. So please stay in touch with me and I really wish you the best as you start to employ AI in your marketing. I think AI could be the difference in your marketing career and I'm looking forward to hearing from you as to how well this worked. Thanks again for paying attention and best of luck.