Startups Stack Exchange Archive

Is there a clear cut methodology for defining your vision/mission statement?

posted by: zazaalaza on 2015-08-08
tagged: marketing, vision
score: 4

I’ve red about how having a well defined vision and mission statement can sometimes make or break a company. I’ve also heard stories where companies had to bring a management guru on-board to help them define their mission statement and this makes me think that there might be a methodology somewhere in there.

My question is do I just start writing what I believe the mission should be, or is there some process and are there any rules to it?

Answer 6041

posted by: Denis de Bernardy on 2015-08-14
score: 4

To begin with, make sure you avoid the biggest trap of all. Namely, that clients have little interest in labels, features, processes, or credentials:

Label: “here’s what our product is.”
Feature: “here’s what our product can do.”
Process: “here’s how our product does it.”

Clients are interested in solutions, answers, and benefits. You want your unique selling proposition to lay out one of the latter in terms of client needs and wants. Again: not in your words; in theirs.

Start by brain dumping your clients’ problems:

What are your clients’ primary concerns?
What needs of theirs do your services meet?
What solutions do you provide to meet these needs?
What end results (as in value) do they receive by using your product or service?
Which of these results differentiate you from your competitors?

This should give you a few ideas already. Then ask them directly to gather more data:

What made you decide to sign up / purchase / subscribe?
How would you describe what we do?
What’s one thing that we do better than / sets us apart from our competitors?
Would you / do you refer us?

Dig a bit deeper when you get a positive reply to that last question:

What would you / do you say when you refer us?
How would you describe good service?
Can you tell us a story or a time when we provided good service?
What did this good service entail? / What value did you derive from it?

Important: you want raw, unprocessed answers in a live interaction. If you send the questions by email or something to that effect, you’ll get 5-times rephrased “I’d like to say nice things about you” types of answers. They’re pointless. So pick up your phone or catch your clients in Skype.

Tell them you’d like to refine your marketing message and ask them a few questions on how they perceive your business. Then casually steer the conversation in a way that you eventually ask these questions or some interesting variation of them. And learn more things along the way on what they do, etc.

Once you’ve a few interesting one or two short sentence descriptions of what you do, test them to see which one works best:

Are you comfortable saying your new marketing message out loud?
Does an adolescent instantly grok what you do? (Try it; it can be sobering.)
Does it start a conversation with your potential leads?
Does it prompt others to ask you questions?