Author: Barbara Olsafsky

May 5, 2024

Organize Your Digital Notes: The PARA Method (plus one thing Forte missed)

Are you a digital note taker? Can you easily find – and use – those notes, or are they a jumbled and ever-growing collection of things you promise you’ll organize some day? If that sounds like you, you might want to try the PARA method. If this ends up working for you, go ahead and start sorting your old notes...

Categories Data Strategy/Processes & Productivity

May 5, 2024

Maximize the SEO Value of Your Calls-to-Action

If you’ve used a template to design a landing page or other marketing/sales materials, you’re probably familiar with the format that has you list a catchy sentence that perfectly entices your audience, followed by a button that reads something like “Learn More”, “Download Now”, “Enroll”, or “Buy”. That button is called a Call to Action (CTA), and, when it’s generic...

Categories Data Strategy/Processes & Productivity

May 5, 2024

Asking & Listening: The Problem with Qualitative Data … and what to do about it

When it comes to quantitative data (i.e., number data), we’ve come up with a lot of “scientific” standards for assessing quality of the data and how confident we should feel about the conclusions we draw from that data. At its most basic level, that’s things like having a sufficiently large sample size (i.e., a minimum of 30, but more is...

Categories Data Strategy/Strategic Alignment

June 1, 2023

SOPs Are Like a Dictionary for Your Business

What type of thing is the dictionary? And why does it matter to your SOPs?

Categories Processes & Productivity

January 9, 2023

Client Intake Forms

One of the primary tools of the client intake process is the intake form. In this post, I talk about how to set up tools like your client intake forms to help make your client intake processes as simple and efficient as they need to be. What is a client intake form? Client intake forms go beyond the formality of collecting names...

Categories Data Strategy/Processes & Productivity/Strategic Alignment

January 9, 2023

The Client Intake Process

Are you sabotaging your business by making it too easy to work with you? So much of today’s business rhetoric is about “removing barriers.” But you’re introducing barriers if your client intake processes and intake forms are not, at every step of the way, helping you make meaningful progress towards a successful outcome. In practice, these barriers look like In this post,...

Categories Processes & Productivity/Strategic Alignment

April 4, 2022

How to write multi-select checkbox questions and analyze the results

No one is just one thing. And that matters when you’re writing things like those client personas that we’re all supposed to have. But how do you capture that nuance in a survey? One way is to use the multi-select checkbox question, e.g., check all that apply. But how do you write a checkbox question that gives you information instead...

Categories Data Strategy

March 1, 2022

How to write open-ended questions and analyze the results

There are so many good use cases for open-ended questions, and including them as part of your surveys can really increase the insight you can glean from your respondents. But: (1) How do you write questions that get the type of answers you need? (2) How do you reduce all of that free-flowing text into something that’s manageable and usable?

Categories Data Strategy

February 21, 2022

How to tackle a huge project | A SOP Story

TL;DR? There are four things you can do to make a huge project not only seem manageable but be manageable, even as you keep saying to yourself, “What was I thinking taking this on?!?” (1) Know what you’re trying to do and break it down into manageable steps as soon as possible. (2) Track your progress in a way that fosters...

Categories Processes & Productivity

February 1, 2022

How information flows through a mail merge document

There are three files involved in the mail merge process: the Data Source, the Mail Merge Template, and the Review Document (which is sometimes called a merge document). In this post, I’m going to explain each one, covering where they come from, what role they play in the process and how they’re related to each other, and, finally, when it’s...

Categories Tech Stack/Training