Today’s marketing leaders can recite the ABCs of social media: content marketing, revenue performance management, and branding. Yet when it comes to conversations with their C-suite peers, they often speak in another language.
In 2014, the Project Management Institute revealed that 44% of strategic initiatives are unsuccessful. Why? They discovered the main reason is a lack of organization alignment at around 58%. In other words, unsuccessful projects are not highly aligned to a company’s strategic goals.
If you are an executive responsible for driving growth, it’s tempting to be distracted by the myriad new marketing automation tools and marketing cloud applications at the expense of strategic priorities. We succumb to these diversions at the expense of other leadership fundamentals—the ability to capture the hearts and minds of our stakeholders. We bypass the opportunity to make things happen swiftly, optimize our customer interactions, and seize new growth opportunities.
Here are five ways to help increase agility, revenue contribution, and confidence:
- Break Down Your Influencing Strategy Into Steps
- Ask Why
- Anticipate Tensions
- Lower Expectations And Embrace Ambiguity
- Build Your Critical Thinking Muscles
For more detail on these five strategies, visit my FastCompany blog.
While dining in an upscale restaurant, it can be fun to impress friends by ordering a fine wine in a foreign tongue. But when it comes to crucial executive-level discussions, stick to the same language as your table mates.
Other posts you will enjoy:
- 5 Ways Marketing Leaders Can Design “Innovation Vacations”
- Free Whitepaper: Bridging the CIO-CMO Gap
- The Year of Being Heard: How to Think Like a Market Maker
