Hey Reader,

Do you ever get that nagging feeling in the back of your head that you're letting people down?

I have lately... It's actually 101 people to be exact.

In August and September, we did a big push to get at least 100 people to fill out our marketing survey. And I personally thanked each person for filling it out, and promised we'd have the report done & sent to them in the first week or two of October so they could start Q4 on the right note.

It's October 21st, and I still haven't finished the report...

I've been stuck.

I've looked at this tab on my computer probably every day for a month at this point:

It's 35 columns x 101 rows or 3,535 cells with a mix of single answer, comma-separated multiple selections, and some of them have full paragraph answers in them.

I kept doing little analysis here and there, but mostly avoided it because I couldn't figure out how to tell a story. And I kept coming back to the question, what will this report actually change for the reader other than "huh, that's cool"?

This is actually a pretty common block a lot of people run into when they're developing a new offer or resource, in our experience, and can sound like:

• Am I actually able to do this?
• Will I be able to deliver the results I'm promising?
• Do people actually want this?

It's a mix of the "unknown" problem of doing something new and the "curse of knowledge" where you think something is easy/not helpful because you already know how to do it.

I've looked at this spreadsheet so many times that I now have myself second-guessing if any report based on this will actually be able to help people (it will) and if anyone will actually sign up for our email list because of it (they will). The answer for me was asking for help - I asked Jo to sit down and help me actually make a plan, because we're teaching a masterclass on our findings from this report in Creative Maven Society next Tuesday, so I can't really keep procrastinating.

In 15 mins, she diagnosed:

1. This is actually a report about 'how creatives are making sales right now,' not marketing - I was trying to tell the wrong story based on what the data was saying.
2. Throw away the need to build the report around a "marketing funnel", just because that was our hypothesis when creating the survey, doesn't mean that's what's most helpful based on what we have
3. It doesn't need to be a 15 pg report; no one wants that. A simple ~5-page report with specific findings is better

I was working towards the wrong "north star" for this report, which meant I was just spinning in circles, but I wasn't able to see for myself that I needed to let it go and look in a different direction.

If you're in the process of spinning in circles on a new offer, I'd recommend getting clarity on these three questions:

• What will they be able to do after? (eg: improve their sales process based on what working on for others right now)
• What's the "mechanism" that makes that outcome possible? (eg: stats on what's working + links to our podcast interviews where people can learn how to do the things that are actually working)
• Why will they opt in / purchase? (eg: "How creatives are making sales in business right now" is a specific answer to a problem we hear asked a lot, rather than "We asked 101 creatives, and here's our marketing, sales, & trends takeaways")

Oftentimes, just talking to someone else like a friend, a rubber duck, or a coach, and explaining what you're blocked on will give you insight/clarity on the big 'north star' questions, and once you have those, it's just putting all the pieces together... which I really need to get back to working on the report.

Next week, we'll send you a copy of the report to look at.

Lyndon

Ps - How do you get un-blocked when you're stuck?