Hey there, amazing Reader:
This past week was a whirlwind of AI activity. On Wednesday, I presented a session on marketing your restaurant using AI—which meant spending quality time diving into the history and menus of New Mexico's finest eateries. Yum! But so distracting. Big thanks to Carol Wight and team for the invite.
That evening, I attended the first-ever New Mexico Artificial Intelligence Consortium meeting at ABQ's Q Station. It was a great gathering of AI professionals from universities, research labs, and the development side. There were a lot of interesting thoughts on where AI is headed.
The next day, I did a hands-on session with a property tax software company on using Microsoft's Copilot tools to save time and streamline workflows. I was a little nervous presenting to software pros—what could I possibly teach them?
But it turns out everyone wants the same thing: work that's a little easier, with less information bombarding us 24/7.
We had a great conversation about *that* person in the organization who sends tons of information in every email. How can we keep the value, but lessen the cognitive burden?
Simplify your workload? Now that's my wheelhouse.
Finding the Right Person (Turns Out, This is Hard)
One thing I talk about a lot in my sessions is customer care. Because growing your business is really about two things. More new customers, and more (and better) options for current customers.
A lot of trade orgs in particular tend to manage the list they have with very little focus on finding *new* customers. Maybe its because they hate outreach. Or because outreach feels icky. Way too salesy?
Here's the reality: your contact lists are constantly changing—people retire, move on, get promoted (some estimate you lose up to 35 percent of your list annually). If you're not actively finding new contacts, your outreach effectiveness drops
But this is often what outreach looks like. You meet someone at a conference. You want to follow up but in all the material you collect, you misplace their card. You go back to your desk, spend 20 minutes searching LinkedIn and Google, and you're still not sure you have the right email. Or even the right person.
For creative industries especially—trade orgs, agencies, cultural nonprofits, solo artists—this is a real time sucker. We're good at making things, not doing the systematic detective work required to find the right decision-maker.
This Week's Blog Post
This is exactly why I'm obsessed with Apollo.io. In this week's post, I break down how the small-but-mighty Apollo.io Chrome extension makes finding contact info a breeze.
Like, easier than ordering your next Uber Eats delivery.
Read on to learn more.
Warmly,
Monica Poling
