Three Timely Time Investment Tips

For many of us, it’s been a week of confronting the unprecedented.

It’s been chaotic, as the organizations we sell to are scrambling to deal with how to do business under self-quarantine. Simultaneously, we may be scrambling to adjust our own remote working behaviors while we figure out how our own families are going to move forward with kids home from school and spouses making their own adjustments.

Keeping our families, coworkers and friends safe is the number-one priority, of course, but we should acknowledge that business needs to move forward to the best of its ability. And right now, almost everybody is concentrating on priority one.

Marketers and agencies are scrambling to adjust their own approach to communications in these new conditions. Getting someone on the phone or over e-mail to discuss a program you proposed a few weeks back is going to be close to impossible for at least the next few days. In the words of a wise friend in the business, “Look at this as the longest consecutive string of Summer Fridays in history.”

It’s at times like this that we have to look at the best possible ways to make use of downtime:

1. Cut bait. Investing time in prospecting and researching makes sense now, including reading up on company news and how your customers are adjusting to doing business under COVID-19. When they’re prepared to talk again, you’re going to want to know what adjustments they’ve made and how approaches you may have recommended in the past are or aren’t valid under current and future circumstances.
   
   Are your clients looking to change aspects of their campaigns? Are they taking advantage of downtime to examine their stack and prop up any weak links in the chain? How are agency and brand people spending their time now that they’re working from home? What’s changed?
   
   These are all questions you should be asking so that you can hit the ground running.

2. Educate yourself. Wish you knew your CRM or collaboration tools better? It’s a great time to invest a few hours in training videos. Have a software application you always wanted to learn that can save you time? Try LinkedIn Learning, or even searching instructional YouTube videos.
   
   In particular, learn all the features of your company’s videoconference software of choice. Having been an early customer of Zoom, I thought I knew everything there is to know about it. But doing a few quick advanced tutorials taught me some new Zoom skills I didn’t know I needed.
   
   Investing in building these skills now will pay handsome dividends as things start to return to normal.

3. Review your pitch and materials now. I’m quite biased in making this recommendation, given what I’m now doing for a living. Just know that signing on to do a comprehensive review and overhaul of your pitch and materials can be wrapped up in 6-8 weeks. It’s a good investment considering that we’re likely to be hunkered down for at least that length of time.

Yes, we all know that this crisis is going to significantly affect the advertising business, whether you sell media or AdTech. But the best you can do now is to make smart investments so that you can hit the ground running as business returns to usual.