Inbound 2016 or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Wrong

If you’re a marketer in the Boston area, you’re probably still trying to recover from the miles of walking you did at Inbound two weeks ago (not to mention the deluge of post-event reports and “IT WAS GREAT TO MEET YOU” emails). If you know a marketer, you’re probably sick of being reminded that they got to meet Anna Kendrick and you didn’t. And if you’re neither, you probably have no idea what Inbound is or why traffic was so bad around Southie for four days.

This year, I found that there were some very specific themes that had a lot less to do with marketing and a lot more to do with how you treat yourself as a professional and as a person. I’m not sure if it was just the talks I chose to attend, but I ended up leaving with three major takeaways that stuck with me, and will hopefully continue to guide me as we enter 2017.

1. Cut yourself some slack; you’re doing better than you might think.

Over the course of the week, I exposed myself to a plethora of ideas for running my marketing department. What surprised me most, however, is that much of what I was being instructed to do were things that I was already trying. Prioritizing people over sales, saying “No” if the fit wasn’t there, asking coworkers to help create content and be company advocates, and listening to a person instead of just pitching to them are all skills I’ve worked on honing over the past year. It was certainly validating to know that I was at least on the right track, even if our growth hasn’t suddenly propelled us to the top of the Boston “Up and Comers” charts.

I think this is an issue a lot of people deal with; they look at other companies that have exploded from out of nowhere and are suddenly receiving all the money and accolades. Well, a lot of these companies already have significant backing or advantages, and to truly bootstrap takes more than just a year or two of getting lucky with your exposure. It’s important to keep perspective; obviously, if you’re stagnating, then you need to figure out what could be improved. But most of the time, your growth might be just fine but you’re so busy comparing yourself to the industry leader that you can’t see anything but how far behind you are.

2. You need to be a little afraid or you aren’t going to push yourself.

One of the pervasive themes throughout the conference was the idea that while too much fear can paralyze you, a little dose of it can be a great indicator that you’re doing something worthwhile. You may have heard of the “Fail fast, fail often” method of innovation, but few people ever address what it takes to be willing to do that. Failure isn’t a pleasant experience; I’ve tried campaigns before that were total flops, and I felt like a loser afterwards. Because of my own self-doubt, I figured John would tell me I was bad at marketing and I should feel bad, but that never happened. We moved on, learned something valuable about our market demographics or approach, and kept going.

Obviously, it’s no good to just start recklessly throwing time and money in random directions in hopes something sticks, but if you do your homework and put together something novel, it’s worth seeing it through. And in fact, I found that in times when I got too caught up in my fear and tried to allay it by playing it safe, I actually had worse results than if I’d just accepted that I’d be afraid and pushed through with my ideas anyway.

So the moral of the story, I suppose, is to give up on “Fail fast, fail often” and start embracing “Fear fast, fear often.”

3. People are too smart for your tricks, so just be yourself.

Alright, I’m bringing up Anna Kendrick again, but not because I have massive girl-crush on her (well, not just because of that). In her keynote, she addressed some very personal points regarding vulnerability and authenticity. She spoke about how her first posts on Twitter were very sanitized and inoffensive, because she was afraid to make waves (aha, again with the fear thing). And what she got from those nice, clean posts was…bupkiss. Nobody cared because there was no substance to what she was saying, just the same old fluff. It wasn’t until she started sharing her daily embarrassments and random shower thoughts that people started identifying with her words and paying attention. She had to be willing to extend her true self to the world in order for anyone to relate to her and want to engage.

It’s the same with business. Over and over, people reiterated a point she made: people can smell when you aren’t being authentic. You’ve been there; someone came up to you with their fresh suit and business card, feigned interest in the prerequisite small talk, then flung their own pitch and life story at you. Nobody wants to interact with that guy, yet a lot of us are guilty of being him. When I first met with my sales team and showed them our value prop as an IT vendor (which went along the lines of “We’re reliable and trustworthy and will make sure your systems are protected”), I was told in no uncertain terms that this was worthless as a differentiator because every IT company tries to bill themselves as that. It wasn’t until they pressed me on what really made me want to work that I realized our value doesn’t come out of just being a dependable outsourcer; it comes from our nerdy, puzzle-loving brains.