How Adapt2Changes Works

"Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth." - Mike Tyson

In our first blog post, we highlighted how Mike Tyson’s quote is relevant in our daily lives, as we all know that changes can impact us like getting punched in the mouth. Since Adapt2Changes (A2C) can’t prevent changes from occurring, A2C focuses on how you can prepare to adapt to the changes that come for you.

Our A2C coaching sessions primarily help business owners and executives who need to adapt to changes successfully to continue to grow. We work with you individually and in group sessions, so you can learn from peers about how they’ve adapted well to the changes. Additionally, we guide you on how you can help your team members adapt to changes with you.

The best way to explain how we help you prepare to adapt to changes is to compare how someone who uses A2C’s techniques with someone who doesn’t when the change “punch” inevitably comes.

For example, imagine there are two marketing agency business owners that are of similar size and serve emerging Business-to-Consumer (B2C) clients, helping them attract new business. One agency owner, Marie, works with A2C and consistently hones her skills, preparing to adapt to changes. The other owner, Joe, does not practice to be ready to adapt to changes.

Both agencies have expertise executing digital marketing campaigns for their clients, especially through email, paid search and paid social media. Over the past couple of years, personalized marketing has grown more reliable, and clients expect agencies to provide sophisticated personalized marketing services that use artificial intelligence to deliver positive results. 

A2C has helped Marie learn to practice being open-minded, how to build resilience and how her buyers buy to prepare her to adapt to offering personalized marketing services. Conversely, without practicing these techniques, Joe struggles to get his personalized marketing services launched.

Here’s how these skills help Marie and why Joe falls behind without them.

Open-Minded

Personalized marketing requires a new way to conduct marketing campaigns. All of a sudden the marketing agency must alter its tried and true business processes to offer these services. Moreover, personalized marketing impacts the agency’s pricing to its clients, necessitating a need to update clients’ expectations, so they understand the new value of these services. This means that agencies offering personalized marketing services must be open-minded as they begin to offer them.

Marie has been trying new ways to be open-minded in both her professional and personal life. Open-minded people are often excited about overcoming new challenges, so when you incorporate ways to be open-minded on a regular basis, you’re ready when you need to be open-minded for a big change to your business. For Marie, one way she practiced open-mindedness was by varying her fitness routine. Instead of doing the same two to three workouts over and over again each week, she explored new workouts with varying levels of intensity, changing at least one workout each week. Doing this took both physical and mental effort, but after several weeks, Marie realized that her fitness level improved, and she noted the positive results of being open to change.

When personalized marketing presented itself to Marie, she embraced the change and worked with her team to create new processes and pricing, and she coached senior executives on how to communicate these changes to clients.

Conversely, Joe delayed implementing personalized marketing as part of his agency’s offering. He liked the way he had been doing business, and didn’t want to upset clients with potential risks to their businesses and price changes. 

Building Resilience

Building resilience is another critical skill that helped Marie adapt well when adding personalized marketing services. When she led the personalized marketing program with her team, like anything new, there were bumps along the road. Those bumps often feel like failures as mistakes are made and progress can take longer than expected. In these situations it’s easy to give up because they can be painful experiences. However, Marie practiced ways to build her resilience that would help her get through these challenging times. 

For several months prior to introducing personalized marketing, Marie worked on learning a new skill: how to use artificial intelligence (AI) applications to drive marketing campaigns. She knew that AI would play an important role in personalized marketing anyway, so learning AI principles would be an added benefit. Of course, when learning a new skill it can often be frustrating as you’re not good at it immediately. Marie practiced using the AI application through trial and error, resulting in many more errors at the beginning than successes. Each time she failed yet tried again built up her resilience. By the time she worked on the personalized marketing program, she had a resilience mindset, enabling her to push through the challenges and overcome the obstacles.

Unfortunately for Joe, he didn’t practice any skills to build resilience leading into his agency’s personalized marketing initiative. Having already delayed introducing personalized marketing, Joe was not prepared mentally when he eventually launched it, and struggled when problems arose. This resulted in starting and stopping personalized marketing services multiple times, hindering his firm’s ability to offer it confidently and win more business.

How Buyers Buy

Whether you’re selling to a prospect or selling your team on a new product or service offering, it’s critical to understand how your target buyers buy those solutions. Oftentimes when adapting to the changes, you are actually selling yourself on the change, making yourself the target buyer. 

In the highlighted example, the agency owners need to understand how they themselves along with their team members buy the change of adding personalized marketing services to their repertoire. Once again being proactive is a key to success.

Marie asked questions of herself and her team to learn how they buy. During that process she learned that the team is more likely to buy the change of adding a new service if they understand the overall vision and the expected results. Specifically, they needed to understand why they needed to make this change and how it would benefit them, their firm and their clients. Since Marie understood this, she conducted market analysis and prepared a presentation that explained the opportunity. The presentation highlighted that her clients’ prospects expected more personalized communication, showing that businesses understood their wants and needs before marketing to them. Generic marketing pitches were no longer acceptable. If Marie’s firm could develop a personalized marketing offering, then they’d be ahead of their competition and their marketing campaigns would be more successful, leading to happier clients with more robust budgets and better client retention. Plus, their clients’ prospects responded well to the tailored communications. They could see that providing personalized marketing services would help them grow their careers while simultaneously growing their agency.

By now you know that Joe’s firm did not take the time to understand how its buyers buy. Having already been reluctant to change his firm’s ways to offer personalized marketing, by the time he introduced it, he failed to explain adequately why the firm was taking this direction. Team members didn’t know if the firm was serious about it and defaulted to executing marketing campaigns in the same traditional ways they had been doing.

Ultimately, Marie’s business continued to grow, attracting new clients who need a personalized marketing expert like her firm. Joe’s business slowed significantly as it became difficult to win new clients due to its lack of credibility in modern marketing programs.

A2C helps you build a mindset of being open-minded and gaining resilience, so that you will adapt to the changes you face successfully. Additionally, learning the right questions to ask to uncover how your buyers buy, including yourself as a buyer, will make it much easier for you and your teams to adjust when changes come, giving you the tools you need to grow your business.

Find out more about A2C here.

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash