2 Ways We’ll Reach For Radical Transparency in 2016

totally-rad

Radical Transparency. Moving Inside to Out.

I’ve always been a sceptic of New Year’s resolutions, but I love the idea of taking stock of what you’ve done, what has worked and what can be improved in the coming year. I have a few key personal and business bullets for improvement, but none is quite so interesting to me as the idea of radical transparency.

When we founded StoryPorts in 2014, we made transparency one of our core values. We’ve done a good job internally with keeping that core value alive. We have a open door policy whereby anything is up for discussion. We share full financial and strategic insights with the entire team. We regularly discuss the most painful and problematic parts of starting a business. We openly share just about everything about the business with the team with the exception of things legally not allowed to be disclosed.

All of this is great for the internal workings of the business, and much has been written about these tactics. But transparency within a business isn’t really the same as transparency outside the business. It seems to me that radical transparency outside the business is equally if not more important. After all, we’ve entered the age of the friend-conomy, where the businesses that thrive are the ones that are the most trusted, useful and helpful.

So what are the right type of things for a business to share? Each business is different and has its own strengths and interest graphs for the customers it serves and the problems it solves,  but I think there are three categories of things should be explored:

  1. What’s happening?
  2. What’s going to happen?
  3. What do we know that is valuable to others?

Given this framework, there are two ways in which StoryPorts has resolved to become more radically transparent in 2016.

Answer Every Question

In the first part of 2016, we are going to make a massive investment in documentation. But this investment won’t just be top line “How To” and “FAQ” documentation pages. We’ll have those, too. More importantly, we are going to attempt to an answer every conceivable question that somebody might have about our products. In addition to technical documentation about our products, we’ll be investing in strategic documentation to help people understand why, when and how to get the most value from us. Lastly, we’ll be hosting a monthly “ask us anything” town hall where anybody interested can call in and ask any question they want.

How will we do it?

  • Launch new documentation and FAQ sections to https://storyports.com
  • Publish 50 pages of updated help, technical documentation and strategic topics in Q1 2016
  • Host 1x monthly town hall webinar through 2016

How to Use Salesforce Marketing Cloud

I’ve personally sold, serviced and consulted for ExactTarget (now Salesforce Marketing Cloud) for over a decade. Our product team were previously all technical architects and solutions engineers for the platform. Some of StoryPorts most interesting and sophisticated programs are integrated with SFMC.

When I look at the collective knowledge our team has around Salesforce Marketing Cloud, it is a little bit amazing. And it seems like there is a lot of room to demystify what can be done with the platform and to help people streamline their use of marketing automation, customer journeys, triggered automation, reporting and dynamic personalized content.

How will we do it?

  • Publish 1 “Help not Hype” post per week on a Salesforce Marketing Cloud topic
  • Publish 1 helpful “youtility” per month (i.e. hacks, sample code, templates, customer journey guide posts, etc.)
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