I was called in at the very last minute to help a former colleague run a messaging workshop at a startup based in Chicago. The company is in a very exciting space with an extremely ambitious objective — and for confidentiality reasons I can’t get into much detail.
However, there is value in sharing some of the observations from the group interaction. The audience was the senior management team — about seven leaders from many different functions: sales, operations, CTO, product management.
We conducted what I consider a standard messaging workshop: interactive discussion and development of “Vision, Mission, Goals & Objectives, Target Audience(s), Audience-specific Value Propositions.”
It is fascinating to examine the whiteboard and flipchart notes… and to acknowledge how similarly these exercises run no matter what company at which I run them.
The passion and ambition of the individuals and for the business is palpable. Sure there’s a bit of range from one individual to the next about what the core of the corporate vision and mission should be… but that is healthy in a balanced high-performance team.
Where organizations so frequently come up short is in the development of the measurable objectives. I talk in my e-book “Marketing Unbound.” about Level 4 Motion — and go into substantial detail about the importance of metrics to achieving marketing’s fullest effectiveness at Level 5 Momentum. Once again reality (i.e. work in the field with real people in a real business) confirms the theory.
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