How 90 Minutes in a Hot Room Can Help Your Business

By Sylvia Montgomery

Many of us have come to accept that some form of exercise is needed to maintain a healthy lifestyle. After experimenting with a number of routines, I’ve settled on Bikram yoga. What is most interesting about Bikram is the condition in which you practice it — a fairly large studio room set at a temperature of 105–118 degrees and approximately 40% humidity. It's a total mind–body struggle that lasts 90 minutes in which students perform 26 poses, two sets each.

Lying on my mat during a recent class, it dawned on me that marketing, especially in professional services, is a mind–body struggle, too. All of the activities that you know your firm should be doing from a marketing and business development perspective become the “mind,” while the day-to-day fires become the “body.”

When running a professional services firm, there is a constant struggle between delivering a piece of business today and a more strategic activity like clarifying your differentiation or understanding what your clients say about your firm. The “body” focuses on today while the “mind” knows there are activities it should be doing but is neglecting.

More often than not, I work with clients who echo the sentiment: “there's not time to do the things I SHOULD be doing because I'm doing the things that HAVE to get done!”

Putting off important marketing tasks is easy. One of the mostly commonly avoided is conducting research on clients and prospects. Strategically (for the mind), there are two key reasons for conducting client and prospect interviews: (1) you can use the information to increase your own understanding of the client experience and buying behavior, supplementing any existing data and insight you might already have; and (2) you can capture information on the competitive environment — who do your clients perceive to be your competition? Tactically (from the body), you convince yourself that your company management and project managers already stay abreast of their clients, so there’s nothing new to learn.

You know you are fooling yourself! Once you better understand your company’s brand, reputation, image and competitive landscape you have the foundation on which to build a highly effective and differentiated brand strategy. If you don’t conduct research on your clients (beyond client satisfaction), you’ll never truly learn what is on their minds.

There are three things you can do right now to keep your strategic and tactical marketing activities in sync:

1. Designate a project manager to every internal initiative. This person doesn'tt have to be a marketing or subject matter expert; instead, they are responsible for keeping the initiative moving — even if it means hiring an outside consultant to complete the initiative.
2. Meet briefly and often. Whether it is a virtual meeting or face-to-face, having progress meetings 2 times a week can generate a lot of momentum.
3. Start small and recognize that more often than not 80% is good enough.

 
So, the next time you find yourself pitting mind and body “to do’s” against one another imagine the clarity that spending 90 minutes in a hot room can bring to your business.