Your starting point:
Strategy refresh with a focus on executive alignment.
It looks like you're experiencing pressure from within your organization—particularly from your executive leadership team—to shift your marketing strategy. We recommend starting your adaptive journey by digging into your leadership's vision to fully understand the team's perspective.
Starting steps:
Unpack their vision
- Start by reviewing every asset you can find that articulates your executive team's vision.
- Next, spend time with the leadership team. Encourage them to articulate their vision for the organization in their own words.
- Use these conversations to understand how they expect marketing to contribute to achieving the overall vision. Encourage them to talk openly and directly about what they feel is not working with your current strategy.
- Be mindful of their personal preferences for how a strategy is communicated. You may discover that the misalignment is less about the strategy itself and more about how you're explaining it to them.
- Listen for clues that indicate what they're truly passionate about. For some executives, a renewed focus on customer-centricity, agility or efficiency may be the lens through which they are viewing everything.
- Once you understand the executive vision, the personal passions behind it and the source of the misalignment, you'll be well-equipped to improve alignment.
Reframe your strategy
- Craft a new or modified strategy based on the inputs received from your executives, with help from your team and vendors as needed.
- Look for opportunities to strengthen connection points between the organizational vision and how it will be achieved through the marketing strategy.
- If you received feedback about how the strategy was previously communicated, craft a new framing device that leans into what you've learned about your executive team's preferences.
- Often, all it takes is a clear rationale. Explain the specific business problem(s) marketing is focused on solving. Then tie every subsequent decision back to these priorities and further augment with clear rationale as needed.
- Help your executive team bridge theory and practice by showing them how the strategy will come to life using a few concrete examples.
- Once you're in a good place, socialize and share the strategy with your executive team. Be sure to include a clear articulation of how you took their feedback into account.
Circle back and show results
- Once you've strengthened buy-in for your strategy, be sure to check in with your executive team regularly about progress and performance.
- Consider using language drawn from the scientific method. Share your strategic hypothesis ("by doing X we will achieve Y") and the results and learnings that occurred.
- When possible, put the results in the context of your historical performance. Then summarize the results of your most recent experiment: Will the strategy be continued, refined or changed based on results and learnings?
- Remind everyone that strategy definition is a continuous, iterative process.
- Whenever possible, reinforce to your executives how the marketing strategy and corresponding tactics align with the organizational vision.
It looks like you're experiencing pressure from within your organization—particularly from your executive leadership team—to shift your marketing strategy.