Be Unapologetic About Your Vision and V/TO™

I recently had a conversation with a friend who told me about his IKEA nightmare. After assembling, and reassembling, a piece of furniture three times, he finally decided to look at the instructions.

Crazy, right? I mean, why start building something without first looking at how to get there? As wild as it sounds, I come across that same situation in marketing a lot. I see people trying to start with tactics and move backwards to strategy. You just can’t – and shouldn’t – do it.

Stas Balanevsky and I chatted how to use the vision to get where you need to go by starting with strategy.

If the vision isn’t at the center, it’s time to switch things up

Vision is one of the most important aspects when it comes to your brand. It helps guide your choices and ensures your goals are aligned with the end result. That’s why we always teach our clients to start with a vision, or the V/TO if they are running on EOS, and work out from there.

However, I see a lot of roadblocks from CEOs. They want to please the CMO that they’ve had forever. Or they want to please the VP of sales that’s been around since the very beginning.

That’s a problem.

To keep the vision central to a company’s goals, the CEO, that visionary, has got to be unapologetic and hell bent on reaching their vision at all costs.

Sometimes you need to switch up the core team. The visionary needs to surround themselves with people that believe in them, in the vision, and think they have a better than snowball’s chance in hell of getting it done.

This is where the KPIs and those measurables come into play. If the VP of sales isn’t getting it done, then maybe they don’t buy in a hundred percent. If that’s the case, switch it out.