Unfortunately, as is often the case at the moment, I was given a fairly short deadline, and I also had a number of other tasks to complete (such as a 5 year sales forecast) so I had one full day to submit this marketing strategy document.
As you can imagine, I went into full report writing mode. I quickly fleshed out a skeleton of what I needed to cover as a very rough mind map, and then started populating the sections. I was basically composing on the fly, and was typing out section after section, paying little heed to formatting, and occasionally switching across from Word to Excel, to churn out a few sypporting tables and charts.
At the end of the day, the report was effectively written, but was still in only a rough form that needed some extensive proof reading, formatting and a decent tidy up before it could be submitted. I realised that I was not going to meet my deadline, but because it was set as close of business on the Friday, I knew that I could tidy it up over the weekend and email it in, so it would still be in place when the office reopened.
All the same, I decided to do the right thing, and advise the recipient that it would not be in their hands by close of business, but it would in their inbox for the start of business on their next working day. It was then that I was caught by suprise.
"Thanks, but we don't need a full marketing strategy document. All we require are perhaps 3 or 4 Powerpoint slides with broad bullet points covering the key part of your product marketing strategy going forward. As long as you get something to us by Monday, all should be fine."
I had a mixed response to this at first. I felt stupid for putting so much effort into it, and not obviously taking the time to determine just what was required. I felt relieved that not quite hitting the deadline wasn't seen to be a problem. Finally, I felt frustrated because I had "wasted" a fair bit of time and effort writing up a detailed document.
I then realised that it had actually worked out well however. My day of pounding away at the keyboard proved to be a good exercise in getting my thoughts together on the topic. I had also written many powerful phrases (well at least to me) that captured the essence of my marketing strategy, with sound arguments and backing information. The exercise of then taking this information and putting into a handful slides was easy in the end, and I actually think my submitted strategy is all the better for it.
What did I learn from this experience?
1. It is important to understand exactly what are the deliverables when you agree to provide some output for someone, be it a marketing strategy, a production report, a budget presentation or whatever. It will save a heap of frustration on both sides later on.
2. It is also however very beneficial to spend a lot of quality time, working through your main arguments for a report or presentation as if you are having to provide a lot of fine detail, even if the final output is relatively simple with only broad main points required.
3. The act of generating all the background information and arguments, and actually typing them up, or capturing them in writing does truly help crystallise the important facts that need to be covered even at a higher level.
I won't always have the time to spend the same amount of effort working through detail for what might end up being a simple, high level presentation or report, but when I can work through it as if it is a detailed document, the end result will always have much better developed main points, supported with well thought out arguments.
Later.
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