Follow Up: Demand Generation is a Workout, Part One of Two

Readers of this blog might recall in March I announced I was running the Pittsburgh marathon on 5/1/16. Yeah, I finished it, but that’s not the point. There are demand generation parallels in five areas I’d like to mention:

• Lead with need
• Goal setting
• Tracking systems and meeting milestones
• Overcoming obstacles
• Get the right help at the right time

First, let me mention a couple of important things about this marathon experience. Am I an avid runner? Hardly. Masochist? Maybe. Lose weight? Bingo. I’ve been adding a pound here and a pound there for a decade. Like the national debt, soon we’re talking real #s.

Second, this two-part blog is not going to be a profile in excellence. As long as we both understand this, feel free to continue reading.

Lead with Need
I have diabetes on both sides of my family and I want to slim down to reduce my risk of getting this inconvenient disease. My family was heading to our Christmas vacation and I said to my wife, “It’s time to do something about this weight.”

“How about a marathon?” she asked.

“Let me think,” I replied. “No.”

“You’d lose weight.”

“OK.”

My wife knows what she’s talking about because she’s the owner of many medals from marathons and other endurance competitions. Her craziest? A 50-miler, which normal people think of as inconceivable. Fast forward to five months later when I crossed the 26.2 mile finish line. Given a choice of running another 24 miles or selling a child, I’d have asked, “which one?”

Business questions:
Where are the gaps in your demand generation efforts?
Are you willing to do something about them?

Goal Setting
I paid the registration fee in late December, making this foolhardy venture real. Then, I promptly did nothing for a week. On New Year’s Day, my wife asked me when I was going start training. Feeling guilty, I said tomorrow.

Since she’s quite knowledgeable in crazy endurance competitions, I let her set mileage benchmarks for me. 10 miles by the end of January, 15 in February and 20 in March. Come again? Be able to run 20 miles in 3 short months? Then she said, and your last long run should be a 22-miler in the first week of April.

You’ve got to be kidding I squeaked!

Without hitting these benchmarks, I’d be the running failure of the family she assured me. Ouch.

If these outrageous goals weren’t bad enough, I had to set a calorie regimen that gave me a fighting chance of dropping 20 pounds of glorious overindulgence, well-earned from years of too many delightful client evenings and remarkable lack of self-control.

Business questions:

• When you set your sites on obtaining different results, isn’t the path to success sometimes a long hard slog?
• In the words of some well-known sales trainer dude, “if you don’t know where you’re going, how will you know when you get there?” Do you know where you’re going?

Tracking Systems and Meeting Milestones
On New Year’s Day, I charged my dusty Jawbone UP, long suffering from intentional neglect. Then, on January 2, the training began with the UP on my wrist. The pain. Oh the pain. But that was nothing compared to inputting everything, and I do mean every da_n thing, I ate into the ubiquitous dieters app, LoseIt.

Results? Sorry, this is too long as it is. Tune in next week.