You need to develop your corporate storyline BEFORE creating your elevator speech
Creating a strong strategic narrative is about a lot more than a terrific elevator speech, good talking points and a presentation deck. This is particularly true when your company (or client) is in a competitive industry, when your business has a lot of moving parts, or when you’re in an extended job search.
Your strategic narrative (or corporate storyline) should enable stakeholders to create consistent internal and external messaging, marketing materials, and talking points for leadership. You should also be collecting on-point industry statistics that can be used in internal and external presentations and help you avoid bringing “too much” selling to your thought leadership.
Here are the nine components that I include in these documents:
- People Should Say: When all is said and done what do you want people saying about you, whether it’s a customer, a reporter or influencer, or an industry analyst.
- Primary LOB Goals: What is the line of business (or in the case of smaller entities, the company/individual) trying to accomplish? It is absolutely critical to involve them early. This WILL NOT work if the creation of the storyline is only a Corporate Communications project. The line of business will be less likely to support external distribution of the message and they won’t use what you’ve created with internal audiences.
- Key Communications Objectives: What are your goals? You’re going to want to develop metrics to assess your success, and these will help. In addition, this is a good way to validate what others within the organization think is important. This section will also help you create a strategy for identifying what you want to talk about externally, who should be included in that discussion, and where you want to talk about those things.
- Context: What’s the external story? What’s going on across the industry and what are the bigger-picture pain points? And how do you fit into all that?
- Words to Focus on When Communicating: What are your “keywords” that will help people find your point of view when Googling a topic?
- Customer Needs We’re Addressing Through Our Innovation Pipeline: Simply put, what are the Customer pain points you are trying to resolve if you want to be successful?
- Interesting Points for External Engagement: What are those key messages you want everyone hammering home on a consistent basis? Be careful here: They need to be interesting to your audience, not just your board or executive leadership team.
- Customer Concerns in the New World: What keeps them awake at night? For example, in the new mobile world, it’s some combination of security and privacy and figuring out how to keep things simple – in that order.
- Visualizing Our Commitment to Customers: Simply, these are the stories that help the audience picture the benefit. Don’t forget your own employees here – they need to see the vision and be able to explain it to customers (often when those customers are angry).
Involve everyone in this exercise and share the document before you slap the word FINAL on it. It’s a document that requires buy-in – including negotiation and collaboration — across the organization.
Remember also that this storyline needs to be a living breathing document. Keep an eye on how others translate your talking points and speeches into their own blogs and articles. Listen to the people on your customer-service teams to see how they “shorten” your carefully-chosen words. Figure out how new acquisitions, new products/services, and changes in the industry impact your storyline.
Making your strategic narrative both a corporate imperative today AND a repeatable process going forward will pay dividends.
