He didn’t like the idea. Said there’s no better way than to just give back the text all marked up.

I approached it differently:

“You’re gonna scare the crap out of them with so many edits. Show them a few examples of your edits before you finish. Get them comfortable with those. Then they won’t fight as much when you hand it back mostly rewritten.”

He said he’d try.

When you have time to do so, sharing work early makes life easier. People get bought in. You can incorporate good ideas. You make them a participant. You spread the accolades.

The risk you run is that you share an idea too early, and the critical feedback you hear nips a good idea before it can bloom. This often happens when you’re still exploring a concept, and the unfinished nature of it freaks people out.

It’s more important with original work than edits. But if you deliver a piece back that’s bleeding with red ink, you’re best served prepping the soon-to-be-bruised ego. It’s not heartbreak if they agree with you.

So here’s my test about when to start you inside sales job. If you can answer yes, then go start selling:

Can you explain it to your significant other?

Does it have a catchy headline or tagline?

Do you have a specific concept or idea you want feedback on?

With those, you will represent the concept well. You will give your audience a fully-formed thought. And you will likely get some decent feedback as you put on your inside sales hat.

By doing minimal targeting — regions, for example. Or another variable not expected to influence results — then you could compare the percentage of impressions to the percentage of clicks to tell how varying demographics respond to your messages and offers.

In other words, instead of paying an ad testing company to poll customers, you can use Facebook to extend your campaigns for similar actionable data and yet more impressions. Ad testing can extend your campaign, rather than merely being an added cost.

It’s not the perfect solution. The biggest problem is that you’re only looking at the Facebook population, which biases your data. But since Facebook has grown so insanely fast and is becoming such a ubiquitous presence, I think it’s a decent representative sample.

Visit iStrategyLabs.com for more info on Facebook demographics

Telling your own internal task-master “let me sleep on it” will yield better creative time after time.

I have a tendency like most ambitious creatives to just stay head down on a problem until I can’t see the forest for the trees.

Three-day weekends can cure problem myopia better than most tricks for big new skills. It’s long enough to bring you back refreshed and eager to perfect something. It’s also long enough to let your subconscious mind make connections that your conscious mind wouldn’t.

The Cascadia gave us an opportunity to revisit the Run Smart manifesto.

Breathing New Life into “Run Smart”

Freightliner Trucks is the left brain of the trucking world. They make durable heavy duty trucks that run until the wheels fall off. They pride themselves on total cost of ownership, uptime, and ROI.

They are, however, almost apologetic about it. When they launched the new Cascadia truck — their first new truck in nearly a decade — we tried to change that.

The oil crisis in 2007 and 2008 sent diesel prices sky-rocketing. Carrier contracts could absorb small swings in diesel prices over a quarter or two, but fuel was double and triple what it was.

And here was Freightliner with a truck that got better fuel mileage, looked hot, and, unlike previous trucks, had a luxury car ride. After all, this is a company owned by the parent of Mercedes Benz.

So rather than touting the numbers, we went on the attack.

We used drivers talking about their test drive to give the claims credibility. And we used Google to target competitor’s search terms and steal their traffic. And we could get away with it because Freightliner had done their homework in the wind-tunnel out on Swan Island. Freightliner provided us with direct comparison fuel saving numbers*.

We gave the numbers context. Saving money became a cause. Run Smart meant more than padding the pockets of the owners — it meant keeping everyone working.

A few weeks afterward, Frank Roehr of Young & Roehr fame, stopped by our offices. He saw the Hard Facts manifesto on the wall, and said, “When I came up with Run Smart, this is exactly what I had in mind.”

* Postscript: As it turns out, the numbers we received were disputed. We ended up taking the campaign down. Seems to me the thing to do would’ve been to fix the numbers and move forward, but I don’t know all the details.