The 3 C's of Effective Marketing

 

Sammi Caramela

Running an effective marketing campaign doesn't have to be complicated. Just remember the three C's of marketing.

A good marketing strategy is a must-have, especially for a small business with a limited following. To truly build brand loyalty, you have to appeal to your customers while staying true to your company and keeping your competitors in mind – in other words, follow the "three C's model" of marketing. This model focuses on three key factors every marketing strategy should prioritize. Here's how to use this method to boost your business.

1. Company

Marketing is all about branding. Start by defining your company's mission and building a brand that accurately represents it. That way, people understand who you are and what to expect from you, and you'll feel more confident in your marketing messages.

"2020 has been a year where employees and consumers want to know what your brand, company or business stands for," said Jessica Garrett Modkins, president of Hip Rock Star. "This is the time to build your strategy around the issues that matter to the very fabric of your service. This is an opportunity to evaluate your corporation's heartbeat."

By doing so, you're reminding your customers who you are beneath the surface, which is crucial in today's socially responsible business climate. However, consistency is a key factor, said Daniel Foley, director of Assertive Media.

"Having strong values and ideals for the company is important, to make sure that all marketing [for]  a business is done in the same way each time," he said.

2. Customer

Your customers are the reason for your business and the driving force behind all you do. It's important to communicate with them in a personal way, rather than simply buying ad space or pushing your products and services.

"You have to know your customer base well and make sure you are pitching to them; make your product exactly what they need," Foley said. "Your marketing should speak to them, not just be shown to them."

This is especially true on social media, where many customers vet businesses before investing. You can get to know your customers by engaging with them on platforms such as Instagram and Facebook.

However, creating a social media account shouldn't be something you just check off your list. To really benefit from it and connect with your customers, you'll want to dig a little deeper.

"Your customer is relying on you to communicate with them – staying top of mind," said Garrett Modkins. "Run a campaign using social media, requesting your customer base to provide their name, email address, telephone number and other industry-specific information you need to stay in touch with them when they are no longer active on social media. Use this database to expand your communication with coupons, testimonials and how-to videos exclusive to this platform."

It's crucial you meet your customers where they are, rather than simply hoping they'll come to you. Find ways to express your appreciation, and support them through their buyer journeys.

3. Competition

Regardless of the industry your business is in, you'll always have competition – and that's a good thing. You're doing something right if you have direct competitors, but you'll want to understand how they market themselves, as well as any gaps they fill that you don't.

But while it's important to keep up with your competitors, they shouldn't be all you think about.

"Competition should be evaluated but not stalked," Foley said. "Remember, your competitors should be worried about you, not the other way around. Continue to innovate, and they will not be competition anymore."

To really stand out from your competition, personalize your messaging whenever possible. Storytelling is an instant way to connect with your customers, Modkins said.

"This is the surefire way to give a point of differentiation between your company and the competition," she said. "Seek out success stories with your customers. Take these stories, and amplify this message through marketing tactics to bring in new customers. Every brand has a good success story which can lead to deeper customer engagement."

Additional C's of marketing

 We put together some more C's to help spice up your marketing strategy.

Compelling

The word "compelling" is defined as evoking interest or attention in an irresistible way. It's also the opposite of boring. From the marketing angle, it means that your brand messaging needs to capture your audience's attention (and, of course, that it doesn't bore them like those hundreds of cookie-cutter pitches they are bombarded with daily).

How do you do that? At a time when people's attention spans are so short, what are you doing to ensure that your marketing message or the content you create truly resonates with your clients in a convincing, powerful and credible way? It is important to genuinely understand what your clients are interested in and to offer them a compelling reason to notice you.

If your content is quickly forgotten – or, worse, not noticed at all – it's a red flag you're doing something wrong. Here's how you can fix that:

• Dig deeper into your marketing metrics from a recent campaign.
• Evaluate how much or how little you've achieved your goals.
• Conduct customer research and/or surveys to determine your customers' biggest pain points and challenges.
• Collect relevant data, and turn them into actionable insights.
• Create marketing campaigns based on those insights.
• Test the effectiveness of your content. Your readers will indicate what they like by responding, sharing and taking action. The content that fetches the best results will tell you what type of content you should write and share in the future.

Consistent

Marketing requires a consistent drumbeat to steadily build up your firm's awareness and credibility. You can't expect overnight results, and you certainly can't expect to get thousands of followers despite never posting a second article on your LinkedIn page. When it comes to your marketing efforts, frequency matters a lot, but what's even more important is to make sure that everything about your brand looks, feels and sounds consistent.

Often, companies struggle in this area. They throw different (and inconsistent) messages against the wall to see what sticks. Unfortunately, this confuses your customers and leaves your company riddled with brand-awareness and identity issues. In contrast, when your target customers hear the same core message several times, they are more likely to spread the word in the way you want.

Millennials – currently the most lucrative market, with $200 million in annual buying power –  demand a consistent experience from brands, a global SDL survey  revealed in 2015 . Clearly, if left unchecked, inconsistency can become the weakest link in your marketing strategy.

A content audit is a great place to start. Assess blog posts, whitepapers, bylines, case studies, social media posts and other forms of content to check if every aspect of your brand's presence looks and feels consistent across every channel. Also, check for consistency in every customer touch point: email signatures, business cards, letterhead, invoices, envelopes, fax sheets and all other things related to your brand.

Cohesive

Your clients find you and interact with your company in a variety of ways, including PR, social media, websites, videos, email, sales meetings and events. However, your efforts across all marketing channels should weave together a cohesive story.

This doesn't mean repeating the same message mindlessly over and over again, in a way that borders on spamming. Instead, it's about finding the central theme that will resonate with your clients and then carrying that golden thread throughout your campaign. Simply put, presenting a marketing campaign that isn't thematically united is like arriving at a party wearing mismatched clothes: People may notice you, but they certainly won't take you seriously.

Instead, take your clients on a journey. Tell them the story of how your company can help solve their problem, and make sure every story has a beginning, middle and end. Don't reduce your brand stories to merely marketing materials or sales pitches. Rather, treat them as opportunities to let your brand's personality shine through and connect on a deeper level with customers.

For B2B businesses competing in today's rapidly changing digital economy, the customer may seem like a moving target, constantly flitting among myriad channels and displaying an incredibly diverse range of behaviors and preferences. The three C's of marketing will help you develop solid engagement strategies and highly relatable content to capture mindshare, build market share effectively and dominate your industry.

https://bit.ly/3q7lnBE

Meet the 10 Fastest-Growing Private Companies in America

 

From insurance and banking to supplements and cannabis, these businesses clocked in impressive results in the last three years

The No. 1 Inc. 5000 company in 2021 is Human Bees, a Lathrop, California-based staffing firm. Its co-founders, Ranil Piyaratna and Geetesh Goyal, were running a life-sciences staffing firm when they saw an opportunity to solve workforce problems across industries. In 2017, they pivoted, and their company has grown a whopping 48,345 percent since. Its winning formula: Cast a wide net for applicants, vet them extensively, and then move them quickly through the hiring process. Human Bees has kept growing during the pandemic, working nonstop to help companies like FedEx find essential workers. It places 66 staffers per day on average, in industries from agriculture to software--saving clients money, headaches, and an estimated 1,180 hours per week. --Sophie Downes.

Eren Bali, an immigrant from Turkey, had already built and scaled online-education company Udemy when he turned his attention to America's broken health care system. With Carbon Health, his five-year-old San Francisco-based health care tech company, Bali aims to give patients what he dubs "omnichannel care," or access to medical and mental health care from many points. With more than 2,000 employees and a fresh investment round that values it at more than $3 billion, the company has the audacious goal of opening 1,500 clinics by 2025 to become the United States' largest primary care provider. Carbon Health ranked No. 2 on the 2021 Inc. 5000, with more than $45 million in revenue and a three-year growth rate of 39,734 percent. --Christine Lagorio-Chafkin

During the pandemic, Americans have panic-bought toilet paper, hand sanitizer, and annuities. The financial instrument designed to provide steady income in retirement is a specialty of Upstream Life Insurance Company, which is owned by Derek Hebert and Colby Arceneaux. They rode the wave of interest in so-called safer investments all the way to No. 3 on the 2021 Inc. 5000. The two businessmen acquired the more than 100-year-old Oxford, Mississippi-based company in 2018. In 2020, it booked $194 million in revenue, up 36,955 percent from 2017. The key to their success? Charm. "We used everything we learned from being from the South." Next up is life insurance, says Arceneaux, once again betting that Americans will flock to safety. --Gabrielle Bienasz

Well before Massachusetts greenlit the sale of recreational cannabis in November 2018, the Somerville, Massachusetts-based retail dispensary and wholesale cannabis seller Revolutionary Clinics was on its way to becoming one of the largest growers in the state. Launching with medical cannabis products in 2016 helped position the company, co-founded by G. Ryan Ansin, for growth. Today, it boasts around 400 employees, three retail locations, hundreds of products under a dozen brands, and more than 80 wholesale retail clients. It landed at No. 4 on this year's Inc. 5000, with $40.7 million in 2020 revenue. "It's all about setting a clear strategy, understanding what your unique value propositions are, and bringing on the best people to execute on those plans," says Keith Cooper, Revolutionary's CEO. --Brit Morse

Serial entrepreneur Jason Wilk had a longstanding bone to pick. He'd spent thousands of dollars throughout his young-adult life on overdraft and other fees charged by banks. To remedy the problem for others, Wilk, along with Paras Chitrakar and John Walanin, created a financial-management tool with a super-friendly name: Dave. By 2020, the Los Angeles-based company had saved its 10 million members--1.5 million of whom use its banking service, which takes a percentage of credit transactions--$1 billion in overdraft fees. Dave just completed a merger that will lead to the five-year-old startup going public before the end of 2021. --Christine Lagorio-Chafkin

The internet is out of IPv4 addresses. Jake Brander, the founder and CEO of the Brander Group, has a solution: Help institutions like universities and businesses sell their unused IP addresses. IPv4 refers to the 32-bit number assigned to every laptop, smartphone, and website--and as the world depleted its inventory in 2019, the existing supply has ascended in value. The four-year-old Scottsdale, Arizona-based IP address brokerage has been helping his clients reap the rewards, while also building his company, which generated more than $30 million in revenue in 2020, after starting the year with just seven employees. It landed at No. 6 on this year's Inc. 5000, with 27,096 percent three-year revenue growth. --Amrita Khalid

People with low incomes and little wealth are traditional banks' least profitable customers, so some of these banks tend to hit them with extra charges and don't prioritize their needs. Several digital-first "neobanks" including San Francisco's Varo Bank have cropped up as a result, promising better service without the hefty fees. Led by co-founder and CEO Colin Walsh, Varo also boasts a national bank charter, which lets it operate without a sponsor bank as the middleman. Founded in 2015, the company posted $41.3 million in 2020 revenue, with a three-year growth rate of 23,935 percent. It has raised $482 million, according to Crunchbase, and counts NBA star Russell Westbrook among its investors. --Sophie Downes

After a career of bodybuilding and winning world titles, Patricia and Law Payne noticed a weakness in the market: Physical training clients were developing gut and digestive issues after taking fitness supplements, which are notorious for vague ingredients lists. The problem had a solution: Produce an alternative--one that's transparent about its ingredients and formulated with what they knew from firsthand experience would help clients lose weight and build muscle. That formula led to Hardbody Supplements, which the couple co-founded in 2016. Today, their Overland Park, Kansas-based business offers an array of what it claims are better-for-you protein powders, pre-workout mixes, and fitness and weight loss plans, which helped the company book $25.6 million in 2020 revenue, up 22,948 percent from 2017. --Anna Meyer

After landing on the Inc. 5000 at No. 9 in 2020, Nooshin Behroyan's Paxon Energy has replicated that ranking this year. The Pleasanton, California-based energy management consultancy founded by CEO and single mother of two has been around since in 2016, but really hit its stride in recent years. The energy consultancy, which booked $33.8 million in 2020 revenue, tends to thrive when utility companies need help--fast. An avalanche of issues, including the Covid-19 pandemic, widespread social unrest, and devastating wildfires, ignited more growth for Paxon. And the future looks bright--particularly if lawmakers pass a $1 trillion infrastructure bill now heading to the House of Representatives. The plan calls for billions in smart grid and energy-sector upgrades, among other things. --Brit Morse

Budderfly performs lighting, refrigeration, and HVAC upgrades for businesses, and then shares the energy savings with the clients. The Shelton, Connecticut-based company led by CEO Al Subbloie helps customers access real-time analytics about their energy usage, so an owner can remotely detect when a piece of heating equipment is malfunctioning or a freezer door has been left open. The result is a win both for Budderfly--it booked $25 million in 2020 revenue and it's on pace to hit $40 million in 2021--and for customers and the planet, says Subbloie. "The ability to solve this climate problem is right in front of us, but capitalism doesn't always align with that," he says. "This is a way to make sure it does." --Kevin J. Ryan

https://bit.ly/3gvYd3T

Organization development

Organization development stems from the belief that systems drive behaviors, and that people within your organization all want to do their best work. The path to success is trust.

ORGANIZATION DEVELOPMENT PROCESS

Mike’s focus is to find and increase what’s working and decrease what’s not working. Together, we will work to bring your company to a greater level of success and prosperity. We gather data about the work and situation using a variety of methods. Then, we compare collected data against the areas of success and failure within your organization, allowing us to develop consulting, coaching, and workshops to accentuate what’s working well within the organization and minimize dysfunctional organizational challenges.

When challenges happen, the organization can absorb, learn, and evolve to increase what’s working and decrease what’s not.

Beyond processes, there’s an underlying cultural and interpersonal component that usually makes or breaks the success of organization development and engagement. That component is trust. Every action and decision has an implication on your organization’s trustworthiness.

STRATEGIES

ORGANIZATION DESIGN: DESIGNING TRUST-ATTRACTING ORGANIZATIONS

Any training and development effort is a waste of time and money without the right goals, roles, and people.

WHAT IS IT?

Organization design is the skeleton of your organization. A good design supports a healthy flow of work, cash, people, and customers while a bad design constricts these.

From Mike’s research within large and small organizations, there are simple organization design principles that will be implemented. Every employee is entitled to have a competent manager with the capability to bring value to their problem solving and decision making. Every manager is entitled to have employees that can work at their maximum effectiveness within their roles. Every organization is entitled to have a working system for performance improvement and increased effectiveness of staff.

WHY DOES IT MATTER?

In Mike’s research within organizations the idea of trust, felt-fairness, liberty, being unencumbered to complete your work without somebody (or manipulative procedure) constricting you, are what most people want from their employer.

Trust Attracting Organization:

Organizations that generate trust, truth, fairness, justice, friendliness, openness, mutual help and regard – with creativity and good feelings.

Trust Repelling Organization:

Organizations which support the negative aspects of human nature – autocratic coercion, greed, malice, secrecy and self-seeking – all of which are inhibitors of imagination, innovation, and creative effort.

WHAT ARE THE AREAS OF FOCUS?

1. Do we have a philosophy for how work gets done within the organization?
2. What is our current hierarchy and organization chart?
3. Does our current organization chart and philosophy match to achieve quality outcomes?
4. Does our current organization chart accurately reflect how work gets done?
5. How does our current organization design support or constrict our communication, innovation, and people completing great work?
6. Where in our current organization design are we creating unneeded or redundant work?
7. How can we make changes to our organization design to increase what is working well and decrease what is not working well?

HOW WILL YOU MAKE PROGRESS?

1. Faster, better-informed decision-making
2. Lower costs from cutting excess communication and approval layers
3. Managers who know what to do, when and why
4. Employees who can focus on the work by doing their best
5. Faster reactions to change, thanks to a workforce that know their jobs and how they can add value

ORGANIZATIONAL COMPLEXITY AND CHANGE

For the organization to thrive and last, processes must be understood and created to address an ambiguous future.

WHAT IS IT?

This organization development process assists leaders and leadership teams in developing the skills needed to understand how to work with complexity and change.

WHY DOES IT MATTER?

The rate of change and complexity of work is not slowing down. You constantly have to organize information available to you, and determine how to use it best to make choices. This skill can be developed and implemented in your organization.

WHAT ARE THE AREAS OF FOCUS?

While every organization development process changes to meet your organization and leaders where they are, the following areas of focus are meant to share what will be accomplished and developed.

1. Organizational complexity and change
2. Determining the current level of information and problem complexity
3. Leading through complexity and change in action
4. Organizing work for employees’ current level of complexity and change
5. Leading through complexity and change in action
6. Using complexity and change models to develop the next level of organizational leaders

HOW WILL YOU MAKE PROGRESS?

1. Management of organizational complexity that goes beyond strategic planning
2. Effective decision-making and problem-solving when faced with complexity, uncertainty and ambiguity
3. Working at both tactical and strategic levels
4. Navigating change and the increasing complexity using evidenced-based tools
5. Developing competence for leaders to lead the organization through times of complexity, high levels of ambiguity, and change, and coaching these abilities in middle management
6. Management of information complexity and problem complexity
7. How to determine organizational and individual capacity for managing information and problem complexity
8. Implementing specific coaching and mentoring tools to help your staff increase their ability to handle complexity and change
9. Succession planning for ensuring the future of the organization
10. Using Complexity and change models to develop the next level of organizational leaders

ORGANIZATIONAL CAPACITY AND GROWTH

Your organization will grow or wither based on the organizational system and your capacity to develop and sustain what works while eliminating what doesn’t work.

WHAT IS IT?

Organizational capacity is like a bucket that holds water. Your necessary productivity and skilled knowledge is the bucket. The people, products, processes, and procedures are the water.

Is the water filling the bucket? Is it overflowing? Is it too low?

WHY DOES IT MATTER?

When organizations grow and change in complexity, the problems that they felt do not go away – they increase. Understanding your current capacity and what problems are ‘normal vs. abnormal’ will enable you to build a process to fix what needs fixing, increase what is working, and decrease what is not working, leading to a robust, antifragile organization.

WHAT ARE THE AREAS OF FOCUS?

Through this process, we will identify within your organization and departments where you have a deficit or excess of capacity for growth. From the identification, we work to understand what current challenges and opportunities are needed for your organization to make progress. We then work together to develop a plan and progress steps to use the excess or deficit of capacity to make changes and sustainable operations to achieve growth and longevity of the organization.

We focus on:

1. The organization as a whole
2. The departments within the organization
3. The roles within the departments
4. The people who fill those roles

HOW WILL YOU MAKE PROGRESS?

1. Knowledge of where you have excess and deficit capacity within your organization and departments
2. A capacity building plan that will provide operations and structure to grow your organization

TALENT POOL DEVELOPMENT

A process to develop individuals with the necessary skills, knowledge, and competencies both cognitively and behaviorally for enhanced performance within the organization.

WHAT IS IT?

A process to develop people within the organization with the necessary skills, knowledge, and competencies (both cognitively and behaviorally) for enhanced performance. A mentoring program that will work to help to develop skills and knowledge focused on ensuring the organization’s long-term success. A purposeful path for job accountability and authority. An internal culture of continuous improvement, which occurs through succession planning and continued development of people and processes. All of these are substantial ways to advance the talent within your organization.

WHY DOES IT MATTER?

The talent pool development process aligns individuals’ aspirations and skills with the company’s current and future needs so that the interests of both can be supported. It is designed to increase productivity, create trust and to foster conditions where each employee is provided the greatest opportunity for creative expression through work performed for the company.

WHAT ARE THE AREAS OF FOCUS?

While every organization development process changes to meet your organization and leaders where they are, the following areas of focus are meant to share what will be accomplished and developed.

1. Understanding the current condition
2. Identifying what talent is within your organization
3. Putting differences to work in talent development

Coaching and feedback will be offered with organization development areas for enhanced internal systems and processes to the organization and high potential staff. Mike will serve as a resource coach and team development specialist for the group while they are achieving the determined areas of improvement.

HOW WILL YOU MAKE PROGRESS?

1. Competency metrics for internal benchmarking of current talent
2. Creation/Enhancement of interview processes to identify candidates for promotion and hiring
3. A focused mentorship program
4. Learning and development for mentors
5. Coaching for the mentors and their immediate supervisors
6. Integration of the new systems and complementing existing systems for performance appraisals
7. Increased efficiency through people doing their best work
8. Decreased dependence on managers to consistently solve problems
9. Continuous improvement of team culture
10. Appointing internal subject matter experts and integrating performance support systems

STRATEGIC PLANNING AND IMPLEMENTATION

You need to understand the needs, opportunities, strengths and conditions of your current, plus external competitive environment to determine what you will need in the future.

WHAT IS IT?

Strategic planning and implementation with Mike Cardus goes beyond the generic SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) that is completed by a select group of people within your organization. Mike’s research shows that SWOT with your internal staff, with their current knowledge, is no better than brainstorming. You end up with lots of speculation, hollow choices, the loudest voice wins, and a list of ‘action items’ that would have happened without the Strategic Plan.

WHY DOES IT MATTER?

Strategic planning and implementation is the foundation of how your organization operates from today into the future. It is the process that identifies what is working to increase and what is not working to decrease then turns obstacles into opportunities shifting the odds of the current environment into future success, leading to enhanced returns on your investment in people, processes, and products.

Mike supports you to understand the needs, opportunities, strengths and conditions of your current environment and determine what you will need in the future.

WHAT ARE THE AREAS OF FOCUS?

Strategic Planning works with an intended 3 part focus: deliberate strategy – strategy that is realized; unrealized strategy – strategy not realized; emergent strategy – strategy that is not planned or intended and happens to emerge as the plan progresses.

1. External analysis of similar companies.
2. Internal analysis of operations, management, and organizational structure.
3. Developing reports and information
4. Development of a strategic implementation team
5. A process to implement the strategic plan
6. A visual (info-graphic like) planning progress map to show updates and progress
7. Developing an implementation process

HOW WILL YOU MAKE PROGRESS?

Together we will create a strategy, using data and feedback mechanisms to identify what’s working and not working, plus a process to implement your plan. This implementation is accomplished by ‘Making a Smarter Strategic Plan.’

Strategy Maps

A good strategy map should communicate everything a company is striving to achieve on a single page. If your company is made up of only five people or is an enterprise of 5,000 people first and foremost you want them to know exactly what the company is about and what it is trying to achieve. What is more, your employees want to know that your company has ambition and plans and will be around for the long haul. They want to be sure that the leaders know what they are doing and are in control. They want to work in a winning environment and want to know their jobs are secure. One of the most powerful tools in your armoury is a strategy map (that and consistently winning profitable business, the two are inextricably linked).

There are many views as to what a good strategy map should look like and what form it should take. Tesco for instance, has developed a strategy map in the form of a circle which is centred on their ‘Every little helps’ slogan and the two company principles ‘no-one tries harder for customers’ and ‘treat people how we like to be treated’. Tesco, of course, has the resources to not only spend time on developing their strategy but also developing an innovative presentation method. The latter is something that many companies cannot afford to do. There are however, several industry standard templates that can be used, not least of which is the Kaplan/Norton Balanced Scorecard approach. For more information on the Balanced Scorecard, check out the Intrafocus Guide to the Balanced Scorecard.

To make the most of a Strategy Map we would suggest one or two additions to the basic template. The basic balanced scorecard template focuses on four areas of business referred to as ‘perspectives’ these are: 1. The Financial Perspective, 2. The Customer Perspective, 3. The Internal Processes Perspective, 4. The Organisational Growth Perspective. In addition to these four perspectives there are three things that need to be highlighted, these are: 1. A Vision Statement, 2. A Mission Statement and 3. A Core Values Statement. It is true that these statements could be included within the four perspectives, but given their importance in their own right, they should be given the right level of prominence in a strategy map. So how does this all come together? The easiest way to demonstrate is through a sample strategy map template (click on map to enlarge):

There is an argument that there is a fourth element of the strategy that should be highlighted, that of the Customer Value Proposition, on balance this statement should fit easily within the customer perspective and is part of the Mission statement so the need to specifically highlight it is not imperative. Using the above template, any organisation, large or small should be able to describe what they are in business for and what they intend to achieve. For more information on strategy maps and for a selection of strategy map templates, see the documents to the right.

Strategy Map for a CEO

Clive Keyte 

How many pieces of information can you deal with at any given time? It doesn’t matter if you are Bernstein or Einstein there is a limit to the number of things you can do simultaneously. We all like to think that we can multi-task and get more done. The reality is, without exception, we all work on one thing at a time. The more have on our plate, the shorter amounts of time we dedicate to any single item. This is something that every CEO needs to know. Firstly to be aware of the strain this puts on an organisation and secondly to better understand how to manage key information when it is presented.

There are three simple questions a CEO needs to ask:

• What do I need to know?
• Who needs to tell me?
• How often do I need it?

Typically, a CEO will manage an organisation through a set of review meetings. The review meetings will usually take place every month. The people attending the reviews always want to tell their story. They want to be seen and heard and will inevitably go into great detail if allowed. A good CEO will manage this situation and get the balance right between receiving relevant information and allowing the presenter enough time to impress. However, these meetings take a long time and they often do not focus on the right things. What the CEO really needs is a mechanism that provides the facts in a easily digestible format that throws a focus on the things that really matter.

This is where a CEO Strategy Map really comes into its own. If created correctly, a CEO Strategy Map will consist of around twelve items separated into four major areas.This means for any given area of the business, the CEO only needs to look at a maximum of three things. A number small enough to allow full focus on every item. Better still, if the Strategy Map is part of a management system (it should be) the items listed will be coloured with a red/amber/green status. Therefore focus can be given to the areas that need it and the rest left alone.

The following diagram is an example of a Strategy Map for a telecommunications company:

Image from Intrafocus limited – example of a balanced scorecard strategy map

The key to ensuring this works is the data that resides under the Strategy Map. For every objective on the map there will be a set of measures. These measures have to be created with great care and attention. At the CEO level, each measure truly is a Key Performance Indicator (KPI) and more often than not will be derived from several other measures and presented in the form of an index. For example, the Customer Satisfaction Index is derived from a variety of both external measures (what the customer thinks) and internal measures (how well we are performing).

In this way, the CEO gets to see an amalgam of critical measures presented in a way that reflects the performance of the business as related to a set of business objectives. In larger companies or organisations there would be a top level corporate Strategy Map and several departmental Strategy Maps aligned to the corporate view.

You might have noticed the ‘trend’ arrows in the diagram above. These are vitally important. It is essential that decisions are NOT made on snap-shot information. For any anomaly the supporting tend data needs to be looked at. That is, the last few months history of the supporting measures/initiatives. In the case above it would seem obvious to look at the red item “Improve Offering Selection”. This needs to be done, but we can also see from the trend arrows that the measurements supporting the green objective “Improve Knowledge and Skills” are declining. This will almost certainly be a contributing factor to the red and amber items above it.

http://customerthink.com/