Adopt a New Technology Today!

Meet Blanche our new puppy, we adopted her last month - lots of fun and immediate rewards. If only adopting new technology was as easy and engaging!

I spent this weekend doing just that. Learning how to use a new tool, discovering new possibilities it enables, and incorporating it into the way we work.

This is the core of our work at Thrive - helping people and organizations adopt new ways of working so that they can be successful. It was a great opportunity for me to practice what i preach or "Drink our own Champagne" as we like to say. And with that personally connect to what our colleagues and customers experience.

The quest I set out on was to develop our Inbound Marketing processes. I learned how to use some of the advanced functionality of our Hubspot marketing platform, and created some new marketing practices for our team. I've had this tool for some time now, played with it a little, but hadn't changed or modified the way we do things to take advantage of the opportunities it brings. I was still relying on referrals and current customers to generate new business. In short, I needed to dive in and learn enough about the tool so that we could incorporate inbound marketing into our business as a growth strategy.

Here was what was in my way, and why I didn't do it sooner:

• It wasn't urgent
• It required focus (the discipline to tune out other work)
• I knew it would take more than a few hours.
• It involved diving into some technical stuff outside of my comfort zone
• Psychologically I knew it would take ongoing discipline and effort to get the benefits

Do any of these reasons resonate with you?

What got me over the barriers to commitment and action? First off, I had a chunk of alone time since the rest of my family was on a camping trip. Secondly, it was clear that a systematic process for engaging with prospects, customers was critical for my vision of life and business. My New Year's reflection kept bringing me back to goals of a more autonomous business, where prospects and customers could access more tools when they needed them.... and possibilities of sailing for months at a time in the Caribbean with my husband.

Building off my years of change management, and personal experience this weekend here is my recipe for the productive adoption of new ways of working:

1. An open mind to the possibilities that technology with good process can make work easier and more effective (sounds obvious, but we have managed to create quite a number of tech resistant professionals with ineffective implementations)
2. Clear understanding of importance and relativity of tool to embraced goals
3. A chunk of time, after all that is the essence of all technology. Investing time in start up enables huge productivity in repetitive task. No upfront investment, no payoff.
4. An advisor to help you through the learning curve, and keep you accountable to keeping up the new way of working.

You probably already have some technology to use, or could find a free app that could make your life simpler, work simpler and more effective. Adopt a new technology today!

Here are some ideas, I'd love your comments on new tech tools and practices you have adopted recently.

• Stop email insanity, create a project team room to house docs and discussions (Basecamp is our fave)
• Start using SIRI or voice automation to look up numbers, send texts and more
• Organize something in your life with Evernote. (We are scanning all our Holiday photo cards this week)
• Make a commitment to Inbound Marketing. Check out this great template for defining your goals from Hubspot.

If you are a business leaders looking to assess your best opportunities, and get your employees adopting new practices for your success