When I need ideas, I take a walk.

When I need to overcome the hurdles of assembling a marketing strategy, I do something else. And I think you might already know what it is.

Bill James
If you’ve ever read the book Moneyball (and if you haven’t you should), you know about a man named Bill James.

Coiner of sabermetrics, author of his annual Baseball Abstract, something about his story fascinated me. For years he had obsessed over baseball stats and how they may or may not influence the outcomes of a game. Specifically, he wondered if the correlations GMs assumed influenced outcomes actually held any water.

Yet, there was something besides data and critical thinking that was interesting to me, it was how he started making sense of it all.

Think About it, Think Think About It
Like James, there are times that my brain will chew and chew on a problem. No matter what I seem to do, the pieces just don’t come together.

Then I’ll go home, a little frustrated, and start explaining to my wife how I couldn’t figure out this problem because of this and that and…[lightbulb]…suddenly I know how to fix it. Interestingly, it’s by trying to explain it to someone else that it finally makes sense to me.

I think the same thing happened to Bill James. Only when he started to write about his ideas was he able to make sense of them all.

If I Were You
If I were you I’d write about marketing. Sit down, open a blank document, and start typing. Get the ideas that have only lived in your head out onto a page/screen/board where they have room to breathe.

I credit SlopeFillers for the success I’ve had in solving a few marketing riddles that had plagued me for years. This site is, in many ways, a giant journal of me breaking down and solving an endless list of resort marketing problems. It’s why, even after vowing to write less, I still find myself cranking out most of what you see here because it helps me make sense of it all.

Start a blog, talk to yourself on the way home from the office, give yourself a channel outside of your brain to organize your marketing thoughts and I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised with what happens.

About Gregg & SlopeFillers
I've had more first-time visitors lately, so adding a quick "about" section. I started SlopeFillers in 2010 with the simple goal of sharing great resort marketing strategies. Today I run marketing for resort ecommerce and CRM provider Inntopia, my home mountain is the lovely Nordic Valley, and my favorite marketing campaign remains the Ski Utah TV show that sold me on skiing as a kid in the 90s.