An Inside-Out Approach to Business Success: from Why, to How, to What
Can you recall the last time you bought something because your gut feeling was telling you that you urgently needed it? That you simply had to have it? Now answer this question for yourself: why did you buy it?
In nowadays world, the amount of choices we have is almost unlimited, and people are being bombarded daily with messages that expect to generate a purchase action from their side. However, with some many possibilities right at our fingertips, how can you make your offerings competitively stand out in the marketplace?
As Geoffrey Moore explains in his book, human population can be divided into five groups from a technology-adoption point of view: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority and laggards. One important thing to highlight from this division is the existence of a chasm (or bridge) between the early adopters and the early majority.
The theory behind this gap is that the early majority will not try something new until others have tried it first. On the other hand, innovators and early adopters are comfortable with new innovations and make purchase decisions based on gut feeling. Their purchase actions are highly influenced by what they believe about the world and not by which specific product is available. Think of the people who stood in line for hours in front on an Apple store when the first iPhone came out, when they could have just waited a few days and have it right on the shelves.
This bridge or chasm has the power to determine the success of your new product and service offerings: getting the first two segments on board will make the rest of the population follow.
As Simon Sinek explains in his TED talk about how great leaders inspire action, the key to achieve the aforementioned is to convey a message that triggers the audience to follow their gut feeling and to take action. This action can be seen through two lenses: internal commitment and external purchase. On the one hand, to achieve high levels of employee engagement everyone should believe and act upon the shared purpose of your company and how it is contributing to a better world. On the other hand, to spur your customers to buy your products, they must also feel connected to the reason behind why you sell what you sell.
“The goal is not just to sell to people who need what you have; the goal is to sell to people who believe what you believe. The goal is not just to hire people who need a job; it’s to hire people who believe what you believe.” — Simon Sinek
What Simon Sinek proposes for conveying inspiring messages that is called the Golden Circle: start from the why, to move to the how, to end with the what. The principle behind this is that when communicating from the outside-in, people understand the information and figures but it does not prompt action. When communicating from the inside-out, you are talking straight to the part of the brain that drives behavior and the gut feeling that inspires people to act.
“People don’t buy what you do; people buy why you do it. And what you do proves what you believe.” — Simon Sinek
Hence, in order to succeed, organizations need to follow an inside-out approach for both establishing and communicating their purpose, how they operate to facilitate it and what they ultimately provide the world with to make it happen. But how to do that in practice? Let me briefly explain how we worked on the mobile app at Exact.
1. Find out your why
Whether you are an individual, a team, or an entire enterprise, you need to have a clear belief that steers everything that you do. That can be illustrated through a vision or a mission statement, which represents what you would like to achieve or accomplish in the mid-term and long-term future. It is intended to serve as a clear guide for choosing current and future courses of action.
“And by ‘why’ I don’t mean ‘to make a profit’. That’s a result. It’s always a result. By ‘why’, I mean: What’s your purpose? What’s your cause? What’s your belief? Why does your organization exist? Why do you get out of bed in the morning? And why should anyone care?” — Simon Sinek
For this purpose, you must deeply understand the context around you and in which you operate. In our case, we aligned the research based on three pillars: market trends that (can) have an impact on our solution, technological possibilities of mobile devices over fixed ones, and user needs arising in their current situation and to be fulfilled.
While you can gain insights regarding the market and technology sides by, for example, doing desk research and involving experts in the field (such as the development team), in order to gain truly valuable user findings you have to follow a more hands-on approach. Empathize and understand what your users say, do and experience, by talking to them, observing their behaviors and uncovering what their feelings and inner thoughts are. Start with no assumptions to better get into your users’ shoes and define what their real needs are. You will learn innumerable worthwhile information and will truly find a purpose for yourself and your team to make a real difference.
Once you have mapped out all the findings from the market, technology and users, you can put them all together and work on them during a workshop. In our case, we invited the entire team for a one-day workshop in which we briefly introduced the findings of each pillar and then put the participants to immerse themselves in and translate those through a series of creative exercises. These exercises lead us to the following outcomes:
- User needs solvers: Characteristics the solution should have to fulfill the identified user needs.
- Market impact factors: Negative and positive effects the identified market trends could have on the solution.
- Technical facilitators: Main user benefits provided by the different technical capabilities and advancements of mobile devices.
The last exercise focused on an individual brainstorming of potential missions for the team, and a group discussion and refinement of the final new team’s mission.
2. Plan how you are going to achieve that mission
Specify how exactly you plan to make your mission happen. In order words, which actions are you going to take to make it a reality? Think of product strategy (which jobs your solution should facilitate and which main characteristics your offering should have), business strategy (how your company is going to make money), promotion and marketing strategies (how you are going to address your customers and create awareness and onboarding), etc.
Since now you have a redefined clear mission, do more research with your target group into how their journeys look like: activities they perform, interactions with other stakeholders, high and low experience points, etc. Focus on how your to-be-designed solution can improve their experience throughout their journey and ultimately make their lives easier. That will give you insights into how your solution should be for the specification of the product strategy. You can support the definition of these strategies with several tools such as the Product Vision Board or the Business Model Canvas.
3. Determine what specific product or service you are going to put in place
Translate those strategies into a specific solution and determine the required functionalities it must have so that to facilitate the jobs previously defined. Design and build an initial MVP to test the different hypotheses of desirability (your users need such a solution), viability (it will bring economic value to the company) and feasibility (the solution is technologically possible to be built). By following a Lean Startup way of working, you can rapidly develop a basic prototype of the solution so that to iteratively improve it by validating it and learning from it as quickly as possible.
In conclusion, to successfully engage and get everyone on board with your ideas, it is crucial to clearly articulate and share why you do what you, how you facilitate that, and what specifically you put in place to make that happen. This not only helps people inside the company to work towards a shared goal, but also drives the purchase decisions of the initial customer base into buying something they believe in, and its subsequent extension to the mass market.
As a company, you should keep in mind that when it comes to behaviors and actions, it many times does not matter whether we are employers, employees, customers, consumers or users. What we all are is human after all. And as humans, most of our actions are highly driven by what we feel and what we believe in. Clarifying your end-purpose and using it as a compass to guide your actions and your offerings will bring everyone on board and make you succeed in nowadays competitive marketplace.
