Why your team can’t agree on what you do

The same conversation, four times a year

If you’ve had the “what do we actually do” conversation more than once this year, it isn’t settled.

It comes up in a planning meeting, or when someone new joins, or when a proposal goes out and the MD rewrites the opening paragraph. Everyone has a view. Everyone half agrees. Then everyone goes back to their own version.

You leave thinking it’s sorted. Three months later the same conversation starts again, usually when a campaign needs signing off. With a big leadership team, it can run for years.

That isn’t a sign your team is difficult. It’s a sign the answer was never written down and agreed by the people who have to use it.

Three versions of the same business

Each version is true. None of them are the same.

Sales describes what closes deals: speed, price, the relationship. The website describes the business as it was when the site was last rebuilt. The MD describes where the business is going next, which might be a market you don’t sell to yet. Delivery has its own version, the honest one about what’s hard. And marketing is expected to make all of them fit on one page.

It happens to almost every business that grows. You started out doing one thing for one kind of customer. Now there are more services, more markets and more people telling the story, and nothing written down quite fits any more.

Nobody inside the business notices, because everyone knows what you mean. Buyers don’t. They get the version on the site, the version in the deck and the version on LinkedIn, and they have to work out which one is true.

What it’s costing you

Unclear messaging rarely shows up as a line in a report. It shows up everywhere else.

• Every campaign starts with the same argument. The first fortnight of every project goes on agreeing what to say. Launch dates slip, and you’re the one explaining why.
• Briefs go out based on your best guess. Agencies and freelancers each get a slightly different version, what comes back doesn’t match, and rewriting it eats the budget meant for the work itself.
• Buyers choose whoever’s easier to understand. Not better. Easier. You never see the shortlist you didn’t make, so it never turns up as a problem anyone can point at.
• The website stays on hold. Nobody can sign off a site that has to say what the business does when the business hasn’t agreed it. And when the website does go ahead, every design decision turns into a matter of taste, because there’s no agreed message to judge it against.

Why another meeting won’t fix it

The problem isn’t a lack of discussion. It’s that nothing gets decided.

Internal meetings about positioning tend to go wrong in the same ways. The most senior person speaks first and everyone else adjusts. The quiet people with the best customer knowledge say nothing. Someone who wasn’t there reopens it next week. And because nobody’s job is to hold the room to an answer, it ends with a list of good points instead of a decision.

Doing it yourselves usually stalls for one of three reasons, and none of them is a criticism. Some people have the idea but not the skill to make it. Some have the skill but get lost in the detail too early, and the ideas stop there. And most are simply too busy. You’re running the business-as-usual marketing, so the strategic work never gets a day, even though it’s the work you’d most like to be doing.

What’s missing is a decision, made once, by the people with a stake in it, and written down in a form everyone can use.

What agreement looks like on paper

If it’s agreed, you can hand it to someone new and they’ll describe the business the same way you do.

Agreement isn’t a mission statement on the about page. It’s a short set of answers your team can check their work against:

• Who you’re for: the audiences that matter, and what each of them is trying to fix.
• What they’re buying: not your list of services, but the problem they want gone.
• Why you: three or four value pillars, each with proof behind it.
• How to say it: the words to use with each audience, and the ones to stop using.

If you want to start on the third one yourself, here’s how to build your value pillars.

Once those answers exist, “I don’t like it” turns into “that’s not what we agreed”, and the conversation takes a minute instead of a month.

Getting it done in a day

You don’t need a three-month project. You need the right people in a room and someone to hold them to an answer.

That’s what our brand strategy workshop is for. One day, four to eight people with a stake in the answer, sales included. We read what you’ve already got before the day, work through your audiences, value pillars and messaging on the day, and write it all up afterwards so it doesn’t depend on anyone’s memory.

Who’s in the room matters as much as the day itself. If you’re wondering whether to include the CEO, read who should be in a brand strategy session first.

You’ll leave with an agreed direction and an honest next step. That might be the website. It might be your sales material, your content or your systems. We’ll tell you which.

Want to know exactly how the day runs? Here’s what happens on the day.