Best Practices

Assume you attend a conference. The speaker gives you six techniques, 'best practices' as she calls them, that are guaranteed to improve the ability of an e-mail message to drive sales.

The speaker is an expert, and has mined information from numerous companies to develop her point of view.

Do you take her advice? Do you go back to your company, and implement her ideas? Or do you discount her expertise, because you perceive her ideas "don't work" in your culture, or don't work with your customers?

I get perturbed when somebody who doesn't work at my company tells me that my company is not employing best practices.

And yet, if you assume that the presenter is pure of intent, there's a good reason the presenter shared these ideas with you ... they probably work!

How do you filter the ideas you hear from presenters at conferences?