Your Vision Comes First

I read Cameron Herald's Vivid Vision this week. (And I highly recommend it, especially if you’re a CEO or you work closely with your CEO.)

It turns out that not everyone has a clear vision. Even if you’ve built something from the ground up.

When I was consulting, I specialized in working with tech founders who’d hit a growth ceiling. 

They usually were facing one or a combination of a few common obstacles.

Their sales teams were selling to the wrong people, or promising the wrong things, or defining new pricing and packaging for every deal...inevitably resulting in ever-increasing churn.

Potential buyers were experiencing sticker shock because the brand they experienced gave them a certain impression of the pricing to expect, only to be presented with premium-level pricing once they were in the sales process. 

The sales cycle was taking far too long. Because potential buyers were reaching the sales team not actually sales-ready. Because they didn’t really yet know what the product was, what it solved, or why it was worth it.

Customers weren’t engaging in the product. Because they didn’t understand it, weren’t aware of everything it could do, or weren’t finding it did the things they needed it to do...because the customer success and product teams weren’t being guided by the same brand vision as the sales and marketing teams.

Or...a competitor with far more investment behind their marketing had suddenly started gobbling up potential new customers and spiriting away existing customers, serving as a real wake-up call that they needed to invest in their brand, marketing, and sales in a new way.

Bottom line: They needed to refocus on the right-fit customers, to get past their own assumptions about those customers, or get every part of the company aligned around the same script -- the same good-fit customers, brand story, and growth vision. 

That’s where my process came in. After enough testing, I’d honed about three dozen questions that allowed me to write a brand platform that solidified exactly what and who their company was, who it was for, who it wasn’t for, why it mattered to these people, and what it promised them.

I’d start with asking what success looked like to them, what core beliefs drove them, what they wanted to be known for, what they wanted people to say about their work -- and what they absolutely didn’t want people to say. And, what’s changed for people after having done business with their company.

I realize now that I assumed that any CEO (or solopreneur) could answer these questions. Sometimes, it was clear this was the first time someone had pressed them to be able to articulate these things. And definitely the first time a writer put it all in a form they could use -- for themselves, their team, even their market.

That’s why Vivid Vision is the book every CEO — and C-Suite leader — needs. It’s not a complicated process. It’s not easy to do. Or to stick to. But it’s far more difficult to lead, let alone grow, without it.

As Cameron says in the book, “It’s the CEO’s job to figure out where the organization is going. It’s the role of the leadership team to figure out how they will make the vivid vision happen.”

With a vivid vision, all the pieces are aligned. Without it, day after day and month after month, each part of the company unravels.  

For example — you have to have a vivid vision in order for your leadership to build that brand strategy, go-to-market plan, or product release cycle.

Now, your vivid vision is not a brand strategy or a go-to-market plan. There’s no room in the vivid vision process for what the market wants or what buyers want or what investors are into today. There’s only room for your vision.

But, a bold Vivid Vision will attract the right people -- employees, vendors, customers -- and repel the wrong ones. Similarly, the right brand strategy attracts the right buyers and repels the wrong ones. Similarly, (Right might not be the best term here. It’s not about right or wrong so much as good-fit and not-a-fit.)

And, a Vivid Vision works because you stick to it. For the full three years. You revisit it regularly but you don’t rip it out and start again. Similarly, the right brand strategy works because you’re consistent with it.

I’m taking this weekend to work through my own Vivid Vision. Personally and Professionally. If you’ve done the process, I’d love to hear about it.