Four Takeaways from a Month in Crisis

It has been just about a month since marketers’ worlds were dramatically disrupted — personally and professionally. There have been blips along the way but most people are now settling into a routine that will be their “new normal,” at least for the near-term. I wanted to share some of the lessons learned and observed over the past month:

• Resilience. At the drop of a hat, marketers have done massive shifts to turn planned physical events into digital experiences. It has taken an immense amount of scrambling to make this work but marketers quickly developed new strategies to get work done and shift their events.
• Partnerships are accelerating. Physical event players are making shifts to pull together contingency plans for their businesses. This is mainly being done from partnerships or embedding of other technologies within theirs. This has been done hastily, so it will be interesting to keep an eye on these players to see how or if these materialize into changes into their product strategy.
• Communication is key. This has always been true but with people being remote, there has been a need for communication internally and externally to be ramped up significantly. Many stories have been written about the tools and technologies that people have used to do this.
• Work from Home is Work. Personal one here, when people find out that I’m a remote employee (and have been for five or so years), I get questions about how I stay focused or how I resist the urge to do laundry during work hours. First, you can ask anyone in my household that I do not crave laundry overwork. In any case, leaders who were once hesitant are seeing that teams can work effectively when in different locations with the proper technology and process of course.

For the next thirty days, I expect to see more of the above but also a pipeline pivot. The next steps will be to pivot from that moment to figure out how pipelines will be filled for the remainder of the year. Most marketers rely heavily on or at least in part on Spring events to fill the pipeline for the remainder of the year. FInding supplemental strategies is paramount now. More on this to come in the coming months.