Effective leaders use common tools to move their companies to greatness. In order to move a company to greatness, a key factor is in the word MOVE.

Leaders must engage their people at a different level that elicits passion and the desire to not just follow but charge up that hill on their own account, therefore out-running their competition. One of the most powerful ways of doing this is to not just spout off talking points but instead find your teachable point of view—the words, or story, that move people. When this “moves” your audience from the heart up off their feet you’ve more than engaged them inspiring them to do great things. Over several years of research around leaders moving the top companies, Noel Tichy discovered this secret sauce.

When a story is told from an authentic place. It teaches the audience through “… a cohesive set of ideas and concepts that a person is able to articulate clearly to others.” Your primary message wrapped within this story must be crafted specifically to your audience. Now maybe you are catching on to why this topic can be translated into a CMO SHORT (by the way I am also inadvertently creating my own teachable point of view). Take this leadership philosophy and apply it to your own marketing.

To make this actionable, clearly teach your audience clearly, simply and yet powerfully about the concepts and ideas that connect you to one another.

How?

You must first do the intellectual work to uncover  through a definitive process, where you deftly uncover what you provide at the core, not just features and benefits, then match it through relevant research to your market. Next, you do the creative work by “putting it into a form that makes it accessible and interesting to others.” From this research you extrapolate WOW data that is honed into highly consumable messaging that breaks through the clutter and quickly hits home reaching the center of your Best Buyer™.

Finally, lead them to the understanding of how your offering is of value to THEM answering a deeper need, fulfilling something within them that adds to their lives or eliminates a pain. Ultimately you have simultaneously solved an issue they either were aware or unaware they had. When you solve versus sell you have earned a place in their lives transforming it into something better.

If your customers buy purely, unpressed, after seeking you out directly to meet their needs, they do not go through buyer’s remorse but instead are planted firmly on the path to becoming a fanatical community member singing your praises far and wide through the hill tops. The inherent beauty of creating your own Core Story is that its very message provides clarity and cleverness that sticks to your audience allowing them to carry it further and communicate it wider. This is when real, sustainable growth happens.

Onward and upward.

By Shiloh Kelly, Chet Holmes International