Testing Attendee Resolutions

At BoS 2015, we asked all attendees to write down one thing that they resolved to do as a result of coming to the conference that would make a positive difference to their business and to suggest a date that we should check in.

How did they do?

Some people thought they would avoid a follow up by stating something like, ‘Make more sales calls’, check-in – tomorrow. These were the easy ones – a few of us called those people from our hotel rooms instead of flying home. In most cases, people were pleasantly surprised by the follow up, even if it was only to be told that they had to deliver on their commitment.

Not all of the check in dates were clear – ‘next year’, ‘next time’ were not uncommon ‘dates’. (Note that if you resolve to do something, a hard date, even a long time in the future is better  than, ‘ASAP’. We sent a quick reminder to people on the list last week. Here are some of the responses, shared with permission.

“More phone calls w/customers and maybe prospects”

“In fact, the resolution was a success! I call prospects regularly now. The biggest hurdle was simply fear (I’m a programmer by trade). I think Steli’s talk (Sept 2015) motivated me to get on the phone.

“The opportunity to talk with customers kinda fell into my lap… We, (Know Your Company) recently launched self-signup. Before, CEOs had to do a one-on-one demo with Claire before using the product. Self-signup was a big step forward for our business, but meant some big changes to our relationship with customers.

“Most noticeably, people we’d never met were now using Know Your Company! Awesome… +1 for efficiency and scaling, but we weren’t establishing the same kind of trust and relationships with customers that we had before. Plus I could tell from support emails that many prospects had questions about our service that would’ve previously gotten addressed in demos.

“I’d been looking to take Stefi’s advice for a while, so I picked up the phone and started calling folks. The conversations were great: prospects got their questions answered, and we gleaned some useful insights to improve self-signup. But most importantly, we established trust with prospects that we were real people who cared deeply about solving their problem.

“(A quick aside: I use my BoS notebook to record all notes from my phone calls 🙂 )

“Fast forward to today, and we just finished our best month ever. In June, we sold more new business than ever before.”

“Launch a new product…”

“Hi Mark,

Thank you for your message. We’re on track to launch two new products by the end of this year.

We’ve been making traditional on-premise enterprise software for Web Content Management (www.kentico.com) in the past 12 years and now we’re creating new SaaS products through internal lean startup teams. The first product was launched last year (www.kenticocloud.com) and there will be two more products later this year. So far so good, but we’ll learn more once we launch the new products.”

We look forward to catching up with Petr at BoS USA in September to hear about product launch number 2.

“Quit my job and start a business…”

We look forward to seeing what happens next as you work out the next steps.

“Invite “Never a dress” people to Moz.”

“Tania and Sara came to Moz in February. They did an evening event then the Tania presented at our Lunch and Learn the next day because not as many Mozzers attended the evening event.

“Have a great summer and thanks again for everything in Ireland. I am just finishing up my personal blogs about it now but here’s the first one if you’re interested: http://sistersinseattle.com/2016/06/27/why-did-i-go-to-ireland/

Jamie Seefurth (Jamie’s write-up of here recent trip to Ireland for BoS Europe.

(Here is Tania’s Lightning Talk at BoS 2015).

If you came last year and want to contribute, we would love to hear from you.