Outcome First: Reverse-engineer for collective success

In the last newsletter I covered the key concept behind wildly successful brands: coherence . Coherence is the state of wholeness and unity that fuels collective success.

Fact is, every business is a complex system, and that complexity only gets worse over time...

Unless, of course, you use a few relatively simple principles and rules to orchestrate and harmonize that complexity.

In this article, we'll cover the first rule.

Outcome first.

To achieve any goal, start with the end in mind. Would you try to put together a 1,000-piece puzzle without the picture on cover to guide you? You could, I suppose, but it would really slow you down!

When the outcome is clear, you can reverse-engineer everything you need to say and do to achieve that outcome.

Decision-making gets easier and faster, and resources are used more wisely. "Will this initiative create the desired outcome" -- yes or no?

When the outcome is clear to everyone in the organization, bottlenecks are removed. Every department is empowered to decide what is aligned or not aligned. Velocity of decision-making improves.

Which outcome?

But choosing the right outcome is key. If you choose an outcome that's only relevant to a smaller group of people, everyone else will choose their own outcomes to aim for.

For example, what happens when the business focuses on top-line revenue growth?

• Marketing and sales "sprays and prays," incentivized only to generate leads and sales with no prioritization.
• Sales get tossed over the fence into a 1-size-fits-all experience... or resources are wasted in tailoring too many experiences.
• A small percentage of those customers are happy with the experience, buy more, and refer others.
• Because so few are loyal, more money is pushed to top-of-funnel activities.
• Because the focus is on top-line revenue, everyone outside of sales and marketing can't connect to the goal; they create their own functional outcomes, which fractures the organization.
• When each supporting function has its own outcome, it also fractures the customer experience required for loyalty -- preventing the loyalty flywheel in which growth comes from existing customers and referrals. It's inefficient and unsustainable.

The most impactful outcomes are sustainable over time.

Let's look at a different financial outcome -- CLV, or customer lifetime value -- which is an outcome that is touched by nearly every function. CLV is a measure of how much customers spend with you over time, and can also include value through referrals. CLV is what makes SaaS (software as a service) businesses so attractive to investors, but the core concept is essential for any business.

The CLV goal shifts the question from "who will buy our product" to "who should we keep, and how do we keep them?"

Instead of a scattershot approach, corporate strategy and/or marketing first determines the priority customer segment and what that segment values most (we'll tackle customer priorities in a separate post.)

That customer value then...

• guides brand, marketing and messaging that attracts those customers like flies to honey
• inspires design of products, services and experiences that directly deliver that value
• aligns culture and every department towards delivery of that value
• attracts top talent who are intrinsically motivated similarly to employees, boosting customer empathy
• informs resource allocation towards differentiated capabilities and technologies
• serves as a compass and a sword for aligned, consistent, high-velocity decision-making throughout the company
• creates the loyalty flywheel, with every dollar invested contributing to exponential returns in reputation, margins, overall efficiency, and more -- what I call the power of pull.

The role of brand -- the organizing principle

A brand, at its heart, is far bigger than marketing. A brand is a promise delivered -- a promise made by marketing and delivered through the experience.

An effective brand serves as the organizing principle for complex businesses both internally and externally, making it abundantly clear what value is being created and delivered.

It's always human-centric, outcome-first.

All the wood behind one arrow.

Massively efficient and impactful.

Want a shortcut?

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