Getting value out of any information
Man Bites Dog I guardianmarketing.substack.com
Here you are,
On Man Bites Dog, a publication all about business, marketing, and sales, with a plethora of actionable useful tools tactics and strategic implementations throughout many articles and videos ...
How in the heck do you get value out of this, for YOU?
For that matter,
Replace "Man Bites Dog" with any other publication. Any website. Any course. Any book. Any workshop.
Look,
I'm assuming we're not all that dissimilar in that you are driven to make change, to make some kind of impact, to see your vision come to life in the world, to make money, to be uniquely successful, and because of all of that drive, you may be constantly seeking to learn and try new things.
There's nothing quite like the rush of a new course, book, workshop, etc which has the promise of finally breaking through the barrier you've been struggling against.
Yet,
Personally I can't tell you how many times I've put my time and resources into gaining information only to fail to fully connect the dots. Failing to even get a single outcome, all the while feeling guilty about the money I’ve spent and that I should have put all that information to use.
A little bit of behind the scenes here:
I'm personally making it my mission with Man Bites Dog to not only provide a publication that has valuable actionable insight and information around business, marketing, and sales, but to do so in a way which facilitates YOU actively implementing and getting impactful outcomes from your effort and investment.
More than that,
Of all the skills that you can acquire related to your business and life, I want Man Bites Dog to help you build the most valuable one of them all -
How to extract value out of anything.
I've been inspired to weave this more clearly through MBD following Nic and Laurel's recent Cash Now Blitz workshop.
(We'll actually have a bundle available soon from that workshop - check back here, or subscribe to MBD and we'll send out an email when that's ready)
Because it was this idea,
How to get good value from the workshop
Which Nic and Laurel opened up with on Day 1. What they presented is a small version of what The Engage the Field Handbook was made for.
How do you extract meaningful value out of information in a way which positively impacts your business?
So,
I could leave you with "get The Engage the Field Handbook1" - which has incredibly deep insight into how we learn, along with frameworks for understanding your own unique engagement with the learning process, and is an invaluable resource to anyone who is trying to actively learn and get value from information.
Instead,
I'm going to pull on this thread for your benefit here, in a way which I think will also build on the value of Man Bites Dog for you.
Take one thing.
Just 1.
And implement it.
If it sounds too simple and obvious, then we're clearly on the right track. That's our whole thing here in Man Bites Dog - the boring stuff that just works.
But chances are,
You're going to disregard what I just said even if it logically makes sense to you.
Let's find out why,
And how we might shift our view on this to get maximum value of anything we engage with.
The dynamic most people fall for is simple
The small steps that don't feel like much are often disregarded as not valuable, and by and large we're drawn towards huge leaps. We see an impressive strategy or technique demonstrated in a workshop or through an article and we imagine the huge impact this could have on our business ...
And so we try to go do the whole damn thing.
Even if evidence suggests that the small steps right in front of us make more sense to take, we still want to do the whole dang thing all at once.
We still want to implement the entire workshop.
We still want to take the whole book and put it into action.
We still want to unfold the entire strategy into our business now.
What may be useful for you to understand about yourself ... all of us really ...
Humans are leapers.
We come up with big ideas and then we just try to will those big ideas into existence. In business it's no different. You see a business that uses a funnel is doing really well, and so you think "ok I'm going to build a funnel now!"
But "I'll build a funnel" is like saying "I'll build a house" before having any design for the house, before knowing the materials, before knowing who’s gonna build it, before even knowing where that house is gonna go or even owning the land!
No one just "builds a funnel" unless they have hundreds of hours and many many funnels behind them, then it only looks like they "just build a funnel." A funnel is a collection of individual components that come together to create a particular lead flow dynamic. People who "just build a funnel" are always building many many components that work together (its their skill and knowledge of how those processes fit them uniquely which makes it look simpler than it is).
Taking big leaps and trying to do a lot of stuff all at once is one of the fastest ways to fail.
It doesn't have to be an encompassing system like "building a funnel." It can be a collection of information which you receive all at once, like in a book, or in the case of The Cash Now Blitz, a workshop.
We find ourselves with tons of useful information, and then our natural move is to try to implement it all at once and simultaneously getting ourselves overwhelmed to the point of either inaction or messy ineffective action.
Take Man Bites Dog for example, on this website you can find enough information to set up an entire ad strategy2 and an entire email strategy3, AND a sales strategy4.
Where do you start?
Depending on your inclination toward action, you might just throw yourself at building these entire systems and stumble through all the unknowns as you go, or you may spend weeks or months planning, sorting, lining things up, waiting for the pieces to come together so you can put them into action.
We want to break this down into as small a step as possible.
A small a tool or tactic as possible.
Let's walk through an example ...
Start with the email strategy I've been laying out in R3 for Email5.
Briefly (very briefly), the strategy outlines one or more principally based email automation series designed to bring new leads into your world and create an active audience of engaged readers who believe what you believe, who you'll then be emailing on a regular basis in order to lead them toward the point of inevitability where they'll buy all your products and services because that choice is their obvious next best stop (not because you convinced them to take the action), resulting in strong multi-year long term relationships with your audience and high ROI campaign capability due to the retention and engagement of this system.
How should you begin?
There are countless ideas, tactics, techniques which go into the building of this strategy and replacing your current email system.
Do you start with conversations with your current best fans?
Do you start by emailing weekly or daily?
Do you start by rebuilding your lead gen?
Do you build your new intro automation series?
Well ... breaking it down to simple components and implementable tools/tactics, what if you just applied Allegiance Capital for Email to your current system?
That's not sexy!
That's not going to give you a huge win. In fact when you implement it, I can nearly guarantee that it will feel like almost nothing.
But lemme ask you this:
How do you know how Allegiance Capital will work for you in email? How do you know how it's going to feel? How do you know how it's going to impact the flow of leads through your marketing and your business?
We could ask these questions of every single tool, tactic, and strategy in the system.
And then we inevitably must ask ourselves ...
How can you build an entire system if you don't know how the individual components work for you on their own?
Again,
We're leapers.
So we tend to not think about this sort of thing.
We see strategies people are using, we see techniques and tactics which impressively make a lot of money quickly for others and so naturally we want to do *all of that thing.*
We don't naturally think, "well, whats the smallest, simplest piece of that I can implement and test out right now?"
We don't think to break down an effective technique, tactic, or strategy to it's fundamental components, to figure out how those components work uniquely for us in our situation, to then build up with the only data that matters (your own).
Why is this harder than it should be?
I'd suggest one of the biggest hurdles in making this shift is that when we work on implementing new ideas, we are doing so with a desire for the results.
Makes sense.
Why else would you start a new ad strategy, or a new email strategy, or run some one off campaigns if not to get the outcome which interested you in the first place?
Risking sounding like a broken record ... we're leapers. We see big outcome, we think "let me get that," without recognizing all the steps that get you to that outcome, and especially without recognizing the critical nature of those steps.
It's almost like seeing someone in a very fine custom tailored suit, saying "I want that" and then buying it off rack, only to to find it really doesn't actually fit you or look good on you. And so you start to think "wow this suit and the person who made it and the person who sold it are full of shit," but you didn't realize that you have to not only first take the proper measurements, but you might also actually need different styling choices in the creation of it for your unique body.
Let me take a breath.
Do you see what I'm saying?
Your inclination is to grab the outcome,
But the only way to get the results you need is to implement each piece one at a time. It's also the easiest way to just move forward and start getting value out what you're doing.
Consider Man Bites Dog - how much of an impact would a single thing have to have for you in order to make an investment in MBD membership worth it?
I'll shortcut that math for you, a year of MBD is $129 - even the simplest tools (such as that Allegiance Capital for Email technique I mention above) implemented with intention are worth WAAY more than that to even the greenest of entrepreneurs.
If you implement - 1 piece at a time.
We talk about this in Microstepping6 over on The Guardian Academy,
But here I want to give you an easier to apply perspective.
Instead of implementing to get an outcome ...
Implement to get data.
We want to approach this from a perspective NOT of making the entire idea/system/strategy produce results for you, but rather from the perspective of "what happens when I do this?"
Testing not for successful outcome but for validation of the tool/tactic/technique for your situation
That's it.
You don't need to run a "Silver Bullet Campaign7" in order to make money right now, you need to implement a "Silver Bullet Campaign" to figure out how it works for you, if it will even work for you, what that feels like to do, and from that data you can figure out then how it fits into your business, so if it DOES have a space you can determine when and where that space is.
Need for an outcome in the short term can blind you to that process. So you've got to be vigilant with yourself.
On the flipside, letting go of the outcome makes it much easier to move past any blocks you may have surrounding fear of failure. Implementing for data has a 100% success rate.
This perspective can give you a handy question that can help you navigate new ideas, new strategies/tactics/tools. If you find yourself tempted by something, you can say "well, how do each of the components work for me?"
If you can't answer that question ... do you have any business blindly implementing entire systems or entire collections of ideas?
Take 1 thing.
Implement it.
That's Engaging the Field.
You put it into action. You observe what happens. Then you return to the source. Maybe you go through a few cycles with the same idea, maybe you're satisfied and want to move on to the next component.
Another example:
Let's say you have a general interest in improving the sales in your business. You might have some ideas of specific areas to target, but you're also open to new ideas as long as they are going to serve your ultimate outcome. So you start reading through the Sales section on Man Bites Dog.
There you would find articles on selling from presence instead of pressure, ideas on placement to increase sales, frameworks, the sales accelerator, the sales bible and other tools techniques and tactics you might implement.
Let's say you really like everything talked about throughout the MBD Sales Bible8 and you really want to put those practices and perspectives in action into your business.
The "whole-ass" approach is ... well ... trying to jam the entire thing at once and hoping it improves your sales.
The "take 1 thing" approach might look like going into Sales Accelerator 1, considering the barbell concept and mapping out the barbells in your business.
That's it.
Most people won't do that.
Because it looks like you aren't getting any result or outcome from that action.
Yet putting that into action in YOUR business will reveal data and understanding about your position which will allow you to better strengthen your process as you keep going through.
It's unsexy.
Map out your Barbells, how could that be so beneficial?
Well,
Have you done it?
I might be beating a dead horse throughout this article, but this honestly is one of the most valuable skills you can cultivate when it comes to taking new information and using it to positively impact your business and your life.
It's how you'll extract maximum value out of any information product, any course, any workshop ...
And it's how you'll get the most out of Man Bites Dog as well.
My final suggestion, plus an invitation
All you need to do is implement one thing.
I'd advise considering the current state of your business, your marketing, your sales, and trying to pinpoint the area where you think you need to work on the most.
If you can identify a specific problem, all the better.
It's a stronger position to be in if you know the problem you have and the kinds of solutions you're looking for, rather than searching around for something that strikes your fancy.
Consider that problem and/or solution, then look through the relevant information on Man Bites Dog for something that looks like it might contribute to the outcome you seek.
Identify ONE THING.
1 thing only.
And go implement that.
Not to achieve the outcome you think you can get from it,
But to gather data so that you can know how that 1 thing will work for you and your business.
Now my invitation:
I'd like to invite you to comment below, on this article, the challenge you are currently trying to work through. The area of your business you're trying to improve, the problem you have, the kind of solution you're looking for, whatever it may be.
You will need to be a MBD+ member to do so - you can join for as low as $30 today and get your question answered right below.
Comment below, and we'll direct you to 1 effective idea to implement that's on Man Bites Dog, OR if we lack the resource currently we'll either point you to an external resource, or make one for you.
This is your opportunity to kick start growth through "1 thing only" implementation.
Be Useful. Be Present. Love the Journey.
Joseph Robertson, CMO Man Bites Dog
Ready to Step Into The Arena?
Ready to engage the field? Man Bites Dog paid subscribers have comment access unlocked below. (They’re also sent a killer welcome package in the mail with all kinds of opportunities that are not available in digital format)
Here are some other options:
Get on the waitlist to join the Arena: engagethefield.com
Check out the Engaging The Field Handbook
Grab your your own copy of the R3 system (it’s a book and it’s not cheap)
Appreciate the call to take intentional action. Just do the next right thing. But how do you define what that is?
Like the leapers referred to, I am inclined to take a bigger, bolder (and riskier) step. What helps me is to ask myself this question, "What’s the step before the step?" And KEEP asking this question until I can’t articulate any possible smaller step. THAT’s the next smallest viable step. It’s not the sexiest approach but it compounds over time to get me closer to what I want without the risk of burning myself out or blowing myself up.