As mentioned in an earlier article, a Bloom Team made up of four or five of your achievers can really accelerate your marketing. This Bloom Team can be used to:

• Validate
• Implement
• Criticize

When an achiever validates one of your ideas, she lets you know your thinking is on the right track. Coaxing creative ideas to the surface is a recurring marketing challenge. Not all your ideas will generate a positive change for your company. To create is to risk. Youll never discover completely fresh ideas or combine old ideas in innovative ways unless you are willing to climb onto some fresh limbs.

And that means that yes, sometimes you are going to fall. Some of your best creative ideas will wind up being outlandishly stupid. Thats okay! If a few of your proposals arent a little bit out there then you are stuck in creative first gear and need to upshift your imagination a notch or two.

So, an achiever can help you by validating your ideas. Of course the market is always the ultimate test of any marketing concept. And who is the market, if its not your clients? Some of your achievers will be in touch with your clients in a much friendlier manner than you. Others will be in contact with clients in different and distinct ways from you.

Of course achievers can and should also criticize your marketing ideas. The last thing you need is a bunch of so-called yes-men or yes-women on your team. You know your customers arent yes-customers. They tell you what they want and can be pretty blunt about it. Nothing wrong with that; it speeds us on the way to making the sale.

But often your best achievers intuit when a new marketing idea runs counter to your brand and your marketing mission. Openly listening to Bloom Team feedback is never more critical than at these moments. Big companies should listen to their achiever base more; some could avoid millions of dollars in losses if they did.

You can be nimbler than these big companies. You are plugged in at a much closer level to the customer.

But, the most valuable thing achievers do, is implement. You can devise the slickest marketing idea ever, but if nobody in your company is sufficiently behind it to put it into action, youll go nowhere.

Think back to other jobs youve worked, when management had some new wonderful directive they wanted to introduce and ensure everybody followed. A memo on a bulletin board or a short speech from a supervisor were all the notice that most of us ever got, especially when we were at lower, entry-level jobs. Unless we worked in a very intimate setting where there were ten people or fewer, we were usually distanced from management. So implementing the new order became as joyful as a forced march.

Your Bloom Team can be the vehicle to help you change this type of top-down, dictatorial marketing style in your small business. The achievers must become active carriers of the marketing message to the rest of the company. They are like missionaries, spreading the new marketing word out to the employees that havent yet heard it.

The achievers will buy-in to the marketing ideas because they are active in the creation of these ideas. Since they believe, theyll be able to convince many of the employees, simply because of their positions of respect and authority in the company.

Most achievers are viewed as respected peers by other employees. On some level they are perceived as co-workers, even if they are in supervisory positions. Your marketing ideas can be effectively implemented within the company when you have a small cadre of achievers pushing forward for you--your very own Bloom Team to help the company flourish and grow.

One final tip: Create a New Idea VIC Checklist.

This tool can help you with any new idea you are launching. It could be a new campaign, a new brand headline, a new media push. The main idea is this: Use a checklist or some other type of cheat-sheet as an aide in your meetings. If you cant fill out during the Bloom Team meeting, then please fill out immediately afterward. At the top of the page, insert a brief description of the marketing idea; underneath list names of team members, their comments, and then a simple plus or minus sign to indicate if the individual team members liked the marketing idea or not. Then, at the bottom, write down your next steps and a target date for completion of these next steps (very important if you want to keep your marketing projects moving forward).

Remember: Brand (who you are) + Package (your Face to the Customer) + People (customers and employees) = Marketing Success.

2006 Marketing Hawks