When you are building an organizational strategy, you are going to be confronted with a lot of questions, challenges, and obstacles.
If you aren’t careful, these things can derail your strategic planning and ultimately your strategy.
Over the years, I have become quite attached to 3 essential questions that I have used over and over to help sell and focus my clients in their strategic planning efforts.
My challenge to you is to find out what the answers are that you have developed for them.
1. What is the value you create or want to create in the future for our prospects and clients?
Everything in business begins with understanding the value you create and want to create in the future for your clients and your prospects.
If you aren’t careful and think about this question, you can get caught in the trap of being someone that will take on any project and opportunity that someone presents to you.
That isn’t a good spot to be in.
You have to be the one that takes on the challenge of identifying and focusing your value so that you are in control of the process of building your organization’s strategic efforts.
How well are you doing that?
2. Who will use this value and is willing to buy it?
One of the big challenges of marketing and selling anything is that we often aren’t clear on who our buyers are.
This can manifest itself in taking meetings with anyone that will talk with us.
Trying to sell people that can’t say yes.
Or, just being confused and unproductive because we aren’t really sure where to focus our efforts.
So in setting a strategic direction for your organization, it is vital that you understand who exactly will appreciate the value you are delivering, but just as importantly, who it is that will pay for it.
So sometimes that might lead you to the person above the end user because they are looking for tools to improve their teams performance.
The key is to really go find the person that has the power to say yes and get the check written or authorized.
3. How will I reach these buyers?
A lot of times marketing can be a mystery to us. And, that is a shame because it is essentially a simple question to answer.
The question comes down to am I going to the places where my buyers go to find information?
If the answer is yes, keep going and go more often.
If the answer is no, you need to reconsider where you are going.
Pretty simple stuff.
So that might mean you ignore social media because your buyers don’t go there.
Or, it might mean that you only go on social media.
You may decide to emphasize speaking over advertising.
Whatever.
The key is that if you understand who your buyers are, marketing gets much easier.
So, what are you doing to answer these 3 questions?