Are You a Scrappy Player?

I was on a call with a sales and marketing executive from a tech company and we were talking shop. He shared his three-pronged strategy for the near term but said that ultimately, he doesn't have the secret sauce for market penetration for his product. I told him that I didn't think that was a bad thing, sharing with him my test-learn-iterate model for marketing. Many people forget that with a field that innovates and changes as rapidly as marketing does, a lot of what we do becomes experimental. We become the scientists in the lab coats running methodical experiments (campaigns) in order to understand what is going to work (and what isn't) with our intended audience. And if we're willing to persist in this methodical approach, we become the scrappy player.

I first got the idea of the scrappy player from my son. He started playing tennis when he was four and kept on going until he was about 10 and lost all joy in playing. One of the things he would say when he lost a match was that his opponent was really "scrappy". What he meant by that comment was that the other player was sloppy, but what I understood was that the other player was willing to do anything to win. That the player was tenacious and held on, giving the game the extra effort it took to win.

This reminded me of a story I heard about Tim Tebow. Growing up on a farm, he and his brother used farm tools as a way to train. Tim would lift barrels for example and say to himself, "I bet my competitor is lifting 100 times. I'll lift a little bit more". That's an incredible mindset for a person and even a company to have. What are we doing to be different from our competitors, to stand above the noise, to get a little bit longer attention to our pitch?

It's the little extra "something-something" that makes all the difference.

Call it scrappy, call it tenacious, call it nimble, this is a winner's mindset.