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Define "Done" Before You Touch Anything · Imperfect Marketing

• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: Hi, I'm Kendra Corman.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: If you're a coach, consultant, or marketer, you know marketing is far from a perfect science.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: And that's why this show is called Imperfect Marketing.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: Join me and my guests as we explore how to grow your business with marketing tips and, of course, lessons learned along the way.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: Hey there, and welcome back to Imperfect Marketing.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: It is September, which means you've probably got a fresh pile of full projects on your desk right now.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: You know, the we'll wait to get to it after summer list that has officially become the, okay, it's now after summer list.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: So today I want to talk to you about the one thing that quietly decides whether any of those projects actually get finished.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not effort, it's not talent, it's not even having the right tools.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: And I love tools.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: It's really defining what success looks like before you start.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: So here's what got me thinking about this.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: I have a small team and I have been delegating a lot.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: I have watched more than once a perfectly capable person, probably even more than capable, right?
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: Um, just not start something I handed them.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: Not because they were lazy, not because they didn't want to, but because they genuinely didn't know what I was asking them to produce.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: I gave them a task, I never gave them a target.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: And you know who does the exact same thing to me all day long?
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, that would be AI.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: You give a vague ask, you get a vague answer every single time.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: So whether the thing you're handing off is going to a person or a machine, the fix is identical.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: And it's the whole point of this episode.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: So let's go ahead and jump right on in.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: So let's start with done is the wrong word.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: I really think that done is the wrong word.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: We all say it.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: Just get it done.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: Let me know when it's done.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: But done is a checkbox.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: It tells you that the activity happened.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't tell you whether the thing is any good or whether it actually did what you needed it to do.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: So the question I've landed on instead, and this is the one I want you to go ahead and steal from me, is what does success look like?
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: Or said another way, if this ends really well or is done really well, right?
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: What are we actually looking at?
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: What's in it?
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: What's that right outcome or output?
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: That last part matters more than most people think.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: It's not just here's the deliverable, it's the deliverable plus what's inside it, plus the reasoning behind it.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: Because when someone understands the why, they can make a hundred small judgment calls without coming back to ask you.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: And when they only have the what, they either guess or they freeze.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: I've been in marketing more than 20 years, and it took me an embarrassingly long time, I think, to figure it out.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um, that done and success are two completely different instructions.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: Done gets you activity, success gets you the results you were really after.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: So, what does this cost you to skip this step?
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: Surprisingly, a lot.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: On the people side, it shows up as paralysis sometimes.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: You hand someone a task and nothing happens.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: You can't figure out why.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: And when you finally ask, it turns out that they weren't stuck on how to do it.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: They were stuck on what success looked like.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: They didn't want to spend eight hours building the wrong thing.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: So they built nothing instead.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: That's not a work ethic problem, that's a clarity problem.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: And it's yours, not theirs.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: So this one stings a little.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um, we ran a campaign and the measurement analysis on it had to wait until all of the data was in.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: And so we started it and then we were waiting.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: Seven months later, I go to pull that analysis to inform the next campaign, and it wasn't done.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: It had just sat there.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: Not because anybody really dropped the ball on purpose, but because they didn't know exactly what I was looking for in it.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: So they just didn't revisit it.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: It never got finished.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: Seven months gone on the thing I genuinely needed.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: And so I had to do it myself.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: Now on the AI side, it shows up as rework, right?
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: You type in a quick prompt, AI hands you something plausible looking, and it's not it.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: So you reprompt and reprompt.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: And 20 minutes later, you're annoyed at the robot when the truth is you never told it what a good answer looked like.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: Garbage in, garbage out, vague in, vague out, but it cannot read your mind.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: And I think this is the part a lot of people forget.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: It will never tell you it's confused unless you tell it to tell you it's confused, right?
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: It'll confidently give you the wrong thing with a smile.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: So here's the pattern I want you to notice.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_00: People and AI fail here in the exact same way.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: Both of them can execute beautifully.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: Neither of them can execute towards a target you never named.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: One clear definition of success fixes both problems at once.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: That's a pretty good return on about 90 seconds of thinking.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: All right, so how do you do this without turning every task into a giant brief?
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: So let's make it easy because I think we tend to overcomplicate this one a bit.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: So honestly, the best way to define success is to show an example.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: If you've done something like this before, a past report, a post you loved, a previous version that worked, hand that over and say, make it like this.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: A good sample does more than a page of instructions ever could.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: And it works exactly the same whether you're handing it to a person or pasting it into AI.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: Now, one of the things I hear a lot is no samples on hand, right?
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_00: We don't have anything that we like.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_00: Then just outline the sections.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: Tell them what pieces the finished thing needs to have and what goes into each one.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: So here are the four sections, and here's what each one covers.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_00: That's it.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: So you've really done and just got two easy moves.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: Show a model of what success looks like, or list out the parts of it.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: You're not writing an essay, you're making the large the target visible.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_00: And either one beats let me know when it's done every single time.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I don't want this to be a nice idea that you nod along to and forget by lunch.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_00: So here's an action step, and it is small.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: The next time you delegate something, whether it is a person or two AI, doesn't matter.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: Before you write a single instruction or single email to kick it off, I want you to finish this sentence.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: A successful output looks like and includes fill in the blank.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: And you've got a sample of what good looks like.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: Attach it, right?
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: If you can't finish that sentence, it's not a reason to skip it.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_00: That's your sign you don't actually know what you want yet.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: And it's a lot cheaper and for time and money to figure that out now than seven months later when you go to grab something and it was never finished.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_00: Now, if you want to level up, try the reframe out loud in your next team conversation.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: Stop asking, is it done?
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_00: And start asking, what does success look like here?
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: I want you to see how differently people respond when you give them a target instead of a task.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's all about progress over perfection, right?
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: But you can't make progress towards a finish line that you didn't draw.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: Now that's it for today.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: If this one landed with you, I would love to keep the conversations going.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: Come connect with me on LinkedIn.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: The easiest way is to go to kendricorbin.com forward slash LinkedIn, and it'll take you straight to my profile.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: Come say hi, tell me what you're handing off this fall, and tell me whether you're a done person or a success person.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: I am working on this too.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks so much for talking with me and hanging out.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: I'll talk to you next time on Imperfect Marketing.