🔎 Spotting a Weak Strategy
🌳 Achieving Strategic Clarity
🗺️ Shedding the Skin
🔎 Spotting a Weak Strategy
Without an effective strategy, you can feel lost. You have this sense of thrashing: trying things, running in multiple directions, and just not gaining traction.
If you’re feeling this way, just imagine how disconcerting it is for the rest of your organization.
Top to bottom, the symptoms of a weak strategy are acute. People tend to run off on their own. They put their needs and interests first, and that breeds a host of problems:
- Poor communication
- Poor delegation
- Lack of direction
- Acceptance of poor performance
- Missed targets and deadlines
- Politicking, bureaucracy, and fiefdoms
- Disengagement (working for the weekend)
Left unchecked, a weak strategy can lead to systemic business problems:
- Declining sales
- Low profitability
- Unhealthy cultures
It’s not pretty and it is avoidable.
If you are feeling these symptoms in your company the first step is to look at the big picture and assess your strategy.
One Stat to Watch
59%
of marketers do not measure the success of their content marketing strategy through sales 🤯😭 according to HubSpot.
🌳 Achieving Strategic Clarity
When everyone on your team clearly knows where they are going and how they’ll get there, you’ve got a strategy. But how you create a strategy isn’t as straightforward. If achieving clarity was easy, no one would ever feel lost.
Achieving Strategic Clarity — being able to clearly articulate your brand strategy and positioning so everyone gets it, inside and out — is a process. You’ve got to work at it to gain clarity.
At Sticky Branding, we guide clients to answer four strategic questions:
- Market: Who and where are the customers that will drive your next stage of growth?
- Message: What is the brand messaging and value proposition that will provoke your customers to buy?
- Method: How do you deliver the right message to the right buyer at the right time with a clear call to action to drive sales?
- Management: What are the management systems and capabilities your company needs to put in place to reach the next level?
This is the starting point of Strategic Clarity, and it becomes the lens to position your brand. It's a roadmap where every department becomes empowered to advance the organization.
Strategic Clarity shows people where to focus their time and resources, and that’s liberating.
🗺️ Shedding the Skin
Shedding the Skin is a powerful strategic planning exercise. In three steps, you and your leadership team can gain clarity to define a path forward for your company:
- Where are we today? Where do we need to move towards?
- What is working? What is not working?
- Who is part of the team moving forward? Who has stopped growing and cannot keep up?
The power of the exercise is in the intention of the questions. It acknowledges that growth is a process, and what got you here may not get you to the next stage of growth.
The exercise’s name implies what’s ahead: change. You aren’t shedding the skin to maintain the status quo. You are changing to grow.
Change doesn't stop with the business. As my mentor used to say, “The ability for a company to grow is dependent on the ability of the entrepreneur to change.”
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