I’ve danced since I was 3 years old. 

I was never good. But I took lessons and did recitals consistently until I graduated high school at 17. 

When I say I wasn’t good - know there’s a story, staring yours truly, falling off the stage and into the orchestra pit. Besides that inherent clumsiness, I never seemed to learn the routines well. To add insult to injury, I was always a bit bigger than anyone else in my class too... not exactly light on my feet.  

None of that stopped me until I just grew out of it. 

I left for the US Army, moved to Germany, moved home, had kiddos, started a career, and generally didn’t look back. 

Then, somewhere around 2005, the local gym started hosting Zumba dance classes. 

I. Was. Hooked. 

But it wasn’t just the fun music and generally hype vibe.

It was because I was good at it. 

Like really good. 

I stopped going eventually but recently returned to the practice. During a class this week, something important jumped out at me. 

Life, work, and dance are all about being good at recognizing patterns. I was able to pick up on new dances because bits of them were familiar. My body remembered and my mind just kept putting the puzzle pieces together.

When we can recognize patterns, we can use those patterns - maybe we can even help create them.

In a time when the world might seem a little chaotic, what are the patterns we can recognize? What are the patterns we can use to improve our businesses, our teams, and our home lives? What is working for others? What can you adopt?

Marketing well is about recognizing patterns - buying cycles, seasonality, data trends, cultural situations, and even daily weather for some of us. To test you need good systems to structure, learn, retest, and do it again.

Pay attention and practice. You never know when that fabulous jazz square* will pay off. 

*IYKYK

AI tools this week. 

It’s been an incredible week of building automations, learning the edges of software, continuing to work on AI agents, and sharing what we know with all of you. 

If you didn’t get a chance to watch Part 1 of our AI Update for Marketing about customGPT, agents, and automation - you can get instant access here.

Part 2 will be hosted later this month followed by optional hands-on workshops to build your agent together! Get Part 1 today for early access to those!

Get Access Now - before it’s added to our store

Also, we’ve been working with Lavender AI this week. Its claim is "the email intelligence platform for sales teams". It has a built-in email best practices grader, connections to see your addressee’s social posts and personality, and more. It is a Chrome plugin. We’ve had mixed results - while some of the rewriting coaching is good, it doesn’t provide the data behind the suggestions and sometimes the tech spins a long time without returning results. It has promise if your team could use some help with writing better 1-to-1 sales follow-up emails, but we weren’t yet wowed.

Do you use it? What feature should we pay more attention to?

Next week, we’ll be checking in from Vegas so you’ll definitely want to stay tuned. 

Until then,

Rebecca and the Advisory 9 team

P.S. - We could have made this edition about Valentine's Day or the US Super Bowl (Ads), but we decided to spare you a bit. 

JK - Happy Valentine’s Day to all that go along. Go Eagles. And Jeep had the best commercial (we’re biased) ✌️.