--- title: "Can We vs. Should We: Why SOPs Are Essential for Data-Driven Marketing Decisions" description: On this episode of Ponderings from the Perch, Priscilla McKinney gives a historical example of why SOPs are so important in marketing decisions. image: https://podcast.littlebirdmarketing.com/hubfs/20261023-can-we-vs-should-we-why-sops-are-essential-for-data-driven-marketing-decisions-1200x630%20(1).png --- [![new-logo](https://podcast.littlebirdmarketing.com/hubfs/new-logo.svg "new-logo")](https://www.littlebirdmarketing.com) - Services - [Brand Strategy](https://littlebirdmarketing.com/brand-strategy/) - Brand Strategy - [- Brand Identity](https://littlebirdmarketing.com/branding/) - [- Persona development](https://littlebirdmarketing.com/buyer-personas/) - [- Market Research](https://littlebirdmarketing.com/market-research/) - [- Fractional CMO](https://littlebirdmarketing.com/fractional-cmo) - [Content Distribution](https://littlebirdmarketing.com/content-distribution/) - Content Distribution - 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          *\*This episode of Ponderings from the Perch is brought to you by The Logit Group. If you've got a market research project coming up and you want expert help, get a* [*quote*](http://logitgroup.com/get-a-quote) *today.*\* The most expensive marketing mistakes rarely look like mistakes while they are happening. On this episode of Ponderings from the Perch, the Little Bird Marketing podcast, host and CEO[Priscilla McKinney](https://www.linkedin.com/in/priscillamckinney/) tells the true story of a postwar British plan to plant peanuts across three million acres of East Africa. Rusted tractors, Sherman tanks stripped of their armor, and giant ship anchor chains all appear, and every new purchase felt like progress. McKinney ties that story to a trap marketers fall into far more often than they like to admit, that mistaking being busy for actually making progress, and to the role a standard operating procedure plays in data-driven marketing decisions. Action brings relief, and that is exactly what makes it dangerous. A team under pressure grabs the nearest tactic, posts more, signs up for another[conference](https://littlebirdmarketing.com/event-planning/), crams the content calendar, and the motion itself starts to feel like proof. Nobody checks whether the soil was ever right. Most teams assume pausing to ask whether a plan deserves the budget is the risky move. Momentum looks like leadership, and slowing down looks like falling behind. So the satisfying question gets answered, and the uncomfortable one gets skipped. “When we have a problem, when we start moving on it, we all feel better, and we sigh with relief,” McKinney explains. “But feeling better and solving the problem are two very different things.” When nobody owns marketing ROI measurement, budget keeps pouring into campaigns no one can connect to results, and McKinney has a name for what that becomes. Skip marketing effectiveness measurement at the start, and the warning signs arrive only after the money is gone. Britain learned that the expensive way. Your last campaign that flopped is likely hiding the same lesson, along with whichever question your team always seems to skip. Anyone who struggles to ask the harder question before the money starts moving can get a head start with Little Bird’s[8 Essential Mental Models for Better Marketing Decisions](https://littlebirdmarketing.com/8-mental-models-better-marketing-strategy/). Music written and performed by[Leighton Cordell](https://www.linkedin.com/in/leighton-cordell-06155ab9/). **Sponsors:** Priscilla McKinney is not just a CEO; she is also a [LinkedIn Influencer](https://littlebirdmarketing.com/social-influence-course/). The reality is that very few people are using LinkedIn efficiently or effectively, and if you’re not careful, social media can become a black hole. When you emerge, you find you wound up in a place you never intended to go and you’re wondering where all the time went. Time is precious, and trying to be everything to everyone means becoming nothing to no one. That's why she's developed a transformative 12-week course that goes beyond basic tips and tricks – teaching you how to build a strategic network and create stellar content that cuts through the LinkedIn noise.   Ever feel like your company is sitting on a goldmine of opportunities, but they keep slipping away? Most companies already have their next big win hiding in their database. Little Bird Marketing's [Revenue Sprint](https://littlebirdmarketing.com/revenue-sprint/) is a proven system that works backward from your revenue goals to create a focused plan for building a sales pipeline and predictable growth. No massive budget required—just strategic execution that delivers measurable results. Ready to turn missed opportunities into new wins? Click [here](https://littlebirdmarketing.com/revenue-sprint) and build a predictable pipeline for sustainable growth. View full Transcript **Priscilla McKinney:** Hello and welcome to Ponderings from the Perch, the Little Bird Marketing Company podcast. I’m Priscilla McKinney, CEO and Momma Bird with you as always. And I want to talk today about a trap that marketers fall into more often than we like to admit. In fact, it’s kind of hard to admit it a bit, but it is the age-old mistaking being busy for actually making progress. So I’m going to talk about why SOPs or standard operating procedures are so essential for data-driven marketing decisions and how you can set your SOP up at the beginning to get you started on the right tack. I’m not going to give you the entire SOP for any given project, but what needs to be at the beginning of the project so that it runs correctly. It really is the age-old question of can we versus should we? So to explain, I’m going to tell you a true story about peanuts. And no, I don’t mean Charlie Brown peanuts. I mean good old-fashioned peanuts. So go back in time with me if you will. Imagine you’re in Great Britain in 1946. Now World War II has been over for some time, but food is still rationed. It’s a bit of a scary time and cooking fat and margarine are hard to come by. Now, you think that might not be incredibly difficult, but let me tell you, pull that out of your life in all aspects. It would be difficult. It would not be a good predicament to be in. And especially for them, it wasn’t good to be in that predicament still so long after the war. At some point, someone said, “Hey, don’t we control Tanganyika?” And just for context, that was a territory in East Africa which later became a part of Tanzania. And they said, “Why don’t we clear a huge stretch of land out there and plant peanuts? This could solve our cooking oil and margarine problems.” So the plan became to clear 3 million acres in Tanganyika, roughly the size of Yorkshire. Now, if you’re living on my side of the pond, that’s about the size of Connecticut. Some experts warned them at the beginning that the rainfall in the area would be unreliable for the crop and the soil wouldn’t be ideal either over time, but the warnings were ignored. Just a hint. There was no SOP in place. All right. So a government commission survey was rushed. It was quickly approved, and guess what? The money started moving. And I think that in the face of a challenge, it’s good to note that action brings relief. Now, that can be a very good thing. You don’t want to be paralyzed about what to do next. So action brings relief can be a very good mantra. It can even be a great thing. Instead of being stuck, we move forward. And that can be very welcome. But beware, because as I said, action brings relief. And just because we can doesn’t mean we should. So the equipment arrives. A lot of it is rusted military surplus. And within a few months, two thirds of the tractors are absolutely wrecked. So they have a bright idea. Let’s take what we have in surplus. We have surplus Sherman tanks. Let’s strip off the armor, bolt on bulldozer blades, and voila, let’s start ripping open the land and get it ready to plant peanuts. Now, ultimately, and interestingly, they used giant ship anchor chain and they dragged that between two tanks and cleared the land. I mean, that’s so interesting. I mean, if we can do it, right? That’s where that comes from. Hmm. So every time something broke, the answer was simply to buy more. And every one of those decisions felt like progress because as I mentioned, action brings relief. And in this case, every time they felt more pain, they took more action to get that relief. Meanwhile, three million acres becomes one million because they have to start shrinking the goal. Then it becomes 150,000 acres. And then 50,000. And in the end, they ended up clearing only 47,000 acres. The cleared ground actually just baked in the sun for a good part of the year and the crops failed. But then the rain did come and too much of it came. And then the cleared land turned into something resembling concrete. So in 1951, six years later, that was my SpongeBob voice, if you didn’t know, they finally give up and they write off about 36 and a half million pounds. That is more than a billion pounds in today’s money. And after all that investment, the harvest came to about 2,000 tons of peanuts, which was less than what they’d shipped in as seed. Did you hear that? They actually imported more peanuts to use as seeds to the country than they ever got out of it. Okay. I know at this point you’re thinking, what does this history lesson have to do with our marketing decisions, Priscilla? But I think of that story every time I watch a marketing team or a sales team jump straight into tactics. It is the same story minus the Sherman tanks. Why? Because action brings relief. And when we have a problem, when we start moving on it, we all feel better and we sigh with relief. But feeling better and solving the problem are two very different things. Just look at what was actually missing in their peanut plan. It wasn’t money, effort, or even a plan. They had all of that. But what they didn’t have was specifically a standard operating procedure or SOP that would get them to ask these very important questions at the very beginning of any new project. So I like to boil the beginning of an SOP down to these four important questions. Yes, there’s can we? And of course, there’s should we, but then there’s also what would it look like if this were done and done well? And lastly, how would we know how to repeat this success? Okay, so for can we, your SOP should answer if you have the people, the tools, the money. And for should we, your SOP should allow someone to say, hold on, I don’t think that’s in alignment with our goal, or I don’t think that is a part of our overall strategy, or it’s not a good idea because of blah, blah, blah. This is where you need to make a judgment call, right? So Great Britain had the can we covered, sure. And especially in their worldview at the time, I mean, other nations were just their backyard of resources, right? But nobody stopped to ask should we? Why? Because when the pressure is on, asking should we feels like slowing down. And slowing down sometimes feels awful. It feels like we might not accomplish something. And have you ever felt that in your marketing meetup? Has your sales team come to that point when you’re talking about RevOps, well, we better just do something, right? Now, I grew up with a very churchy saying, Jesus is coming, you better look busy. And it’s funny because it’s kind of true. That’s the fear humans have about anybody in authority over us, right? So marketing teams and salespeople think we better get busy. But an SOP is supposed to level those emotions at the start and help us make a more logical decision. In marketing, we call those decisions data-driven decisions. But often we don’t stop to get all the data first. So what would asking should we have actually looked like? Honestly, it could have been something as simple as a small test. They could have cleared 500 acres first, planted them and seen how that worked out. Now that is not exciting, and no politician would have gotten a headline out of that. And that’s probably the problem. So take that back to your marketing or sales meeting. But that’s the whole idea behind marketing effectiveness measurement. You test on a small scale, you look at what actually happened, what your results really were, and then you decide whether to spend big. And that one small test would have told them that the soil was wrong for a fraction of the cost. Okay, so let’s stick with business here. I hear the marketing version of the story all the time. Let’s post more. Let’s go to this conference. Let’s get on, insert whatever new platform everyone is talking about, right? Everybody wants to be busy and everybody wants to fill the content calendar up or the conference calendar, right? And it all feels like momentum at the beginning, but nobody checked, right? And they didn’t set up a system where data-driven marketing decisions really can be put to use. So, someone has to be willing to look at the evidence before those tanks start rolling in. Let’s run a real marketing world scenario through this four question SOP. Say your team wants to go to a big industry conference. Can we? Asks whether you have the budget, the people, and the time, right? Some people forget about that, the bandwidth, like the time, right, to do it. Should we asks whether your buyers are going to be in that room? Whether the last event you went to brought anything that you can point to as a success. And there’s many more should we questions to ask. The next one is what does it look like if this were done and done well? Like what could you really get out of this conference? What’s the max? If there are 4,000 people, that’s a very different conversation than if 100 people are going there. And please don’t mistake it. It doesn’t mean that the 4,000-person conference is any better than the 100-person conference. It’s not. But you really need to understand how many conversations can I have? I mean, if that’s doing it well, having a real conversion conversation, then that means you need to be able to quantify it. What is really possible here? And then lastly, let’s say we have success. How will we know that we had success and then are able to repeat it if we don’t write down how we got here? So the how can we repeat this means writing down what you did that produced such a win. So that the next decision is based on evidence and not a hunch. And that is really how simple it is to have data-driven marketing decisions and stay focused and stay, stay honest with them, right? So it’s not a new system you need to buy, a new platform. It just requires some rigor, right? And it’s the difference between a team that is busy and a team that is really making progress. The beginning of an SOP that starts like this turns one good decision into a real process and a flywheel. So you cannot have an SOP just out there in the ether. You’ve heard me talk about it, but now you need to write this down as a simple checklist. And at the beginning of each new campaign idea meeting, that’s what you start with. Now, I’ll admit something here. We joke around at Little Bird Marketing a bit because when someone brings me a problem, my first question back to them is almost always, will money fix this? Because I want relief, right? I want that movement. And you know, sometimes money does fix it, but a lot of times it doesn’t. And I have to get out of the habit of just wanting to throw money at something and have it be fixed. And Britain threw an unbelievable amount of money at those peanuts. So if your team keeps pouring budget into campaigns that no one can connect to results, and no one is doing that marketing return on investment measurement by actually tracking the return on what you spend, then money isn’t fixing anything. That is what I call well-funded chaos. That is action without a solid SOP. So I’m gonna leave you with one exercise. Think about the last thing you did at your company with your marketing team that genuinely didn’t work. Be honest about it and run back through these four questions I gave you and find out. Did you skip the can we? Did you skip the should we? Did you skip the what would good look like? Or did you skip the how would we go about repeating this? Now you might have different answers for different projects that you kind of do this post-mortem on, and that’s fine. But one extra tip for you is that what matters is knowing which question your team tends to skip, right? We have other episodes on Ponderings from the Perch to help you with specific problems. If you want a little bit of a head start on the should we problem, we have a piece on eight mental models for better marketing decisions. We’re going to put that link in the show notes. But subscribe to our podcast wherever you’re listening right now, or just browse podcast.littlebirdmarketing.com for so many other helpful episodes you can search by concepts. But just promise me this, that the next time your team is about to charge into something and it feels so good just to get going, remember the peanuts. 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