Looking out, to look back in — what do your stakeholders say about you?
I was inspired by Barrie Heptonstall’s brilliant article earlier this year about engaging with and empowering customers to advocate — and sell — on behalf of a start-up. Barrie rightly shines a light on the value a customer plays in supporting the growth of a business and even driving sales.
A key part of this is understanding how customers think and feel about your business and using that information to inform your Sales and Marketing activities to equip customers with the right tools to be your brilliant ambassadors.
In that same vein, every stakeholder is a potential ambassador, or at the very least an influencer, for the brand’s success. For most founders, getting a handle on their stakeholder world - understanding how their business is perceived, where they are positioned, and where they need to up the ante to win — is a huge (and possibly never-ending) undertaking.
From a comms perspective, we believe founders need to think about all of their stakeholders — and think about them almost excessively at least once or twice a year. Doing so can add enormous value to shaping the business going forward. But where to start, and just how big a job is it?
We’ve put together a really achievable and simple set of exercises to help make it more manageable.
1. WHO ARE YOUR STAKEHOLDERS?
Your stakeholders are any group with whom your brand has a touchpoint, specifically the groups that have an influence on the success of your business.
We think about this from every potential angle — the full 360’ of your stakeholder universe — and consider the varying degrees to which each of them has power to influence your organisations’ trajectory and market positioning.
1. Direct: Some stakeholders have a clear and direct influence — these are the customers and users of your service or product, or your investors and Board, or indeed your team.
2. Indirect: Other stakeholders are a bit more ‘arms-length’ — consider the organisations that influence the market in which you operate; industry bodies, regulators, market commentators and media. Importantly, also your competitors.
3. Partner: Then there are the stakeholders who participate in your operations in collaboration with you — your advisors, lawyers, consultants, recruiters — all of whom are also, ultimately, potential referrers and third-party spokespeople within the marketplace
All you need is some time in the diary, the right people around the table, and a flip chart!
👉 Challenge One*:
a) Plot all your stakeholder groups on a grid of High -> Low influence
b) Circle the stakeholders that have the most influence on achieving your business goals
c) Observe & discuss! Did you all agree on where to plot each stakeholder? Why/Why not?
*This exercise assumes there is a clear sense of the business’ goals, both short-term and long-term
2. HOW DO YOUR STAKEHOLDERS ENGAGE WITH YOU?
When we talk about communications, we typically think about what we are saying about ourselves on our channels, predominantly channels owned and curated by us; websites and LinkedIn profiles, pitch decks and job specs, being in the news and getting views.
But if you only review what you say about yourself, you’ll almost certainly end up drinking the Kool-Aid — believing what you say about yourself to be the truth. At best, your story is mismatched with how your stakeholders actually perceive you… at worst, your leadership team gets tunnel vision and start to lag behind the competition.
Your stakeholders are building a perception of your organisation even as we speak; it is ‘always on’ and not always visible to you. Stakeholders are learning about and forming perceptions of your organisation through multiple channels and touchpoints, including
a) day-to-day interactions with your team members, reflecting company values and behaviours
b) customers’ feedback: good, bad or neutral
c) press reporting on your news, or who else they quote in a story about your sector
d) intel and opinions shared by industry players who are most out and about in the market
e) what recruiters say about you when briefing candidates
All these nuggets of information are helping stakeholders to build a picture of your organisation and what to expect from working with you.
👉 Challenge Two:
Prioritise the most influential stakeholders in getting the business where you want, and explore how they are interacting with your brand across multiple touchpoints and channels.
3. WHAT DO THEY SAY & THINK & FEEL ABOUT YOU?
Get into the habit of simply asking. It’s not as scary and exposing as it sounds! It needn’t be particularly scientific or process-driven, either.
Larger, more established organisations might consider undertaking a perception audit, which is a coordinated programme of one-to-one interviews with influential stakeholders to get under the skin of how they perceive the business. These exercises are a big, albeit valuable, investment and serve as a useful positioning benchmark to be revisited every year. For most start-ups at the early stages of their growth, a perception audit is probably surplus to requirement, not to mention cost prohibitive.
But the easiest, quickest and most cost-efficient method to understanding how your key stakeholders perceive your business, is simply to ask.
And often. In fact, every chance you get.
In practice this means being curious, asking good questions and really listening to the answers, each and every time you engage with a key stakeholder.
Maybe it’s on a sales call or in a follow up meeting, on a site visit or on a reporting call, at a conference in Cannes. These are all opportunities to ask probing and ‘positioning’ type questions, asking about more than just the business at hand.
Get into the habit of asking these questions, and if possible, document the answers. At the very least, be sure to loop in your Sales and Marketing teams, as these are priceless insights that can and should inform the direction, and narrative, that supports your Sales and Marketing strategies.
👉 Challenge Three:
The next time you are engaging with a stakeholder, take the extra three minutes to ask them what they think about you.
And really listen.
Here are some brilliantly simple and effective questions to get you started:
- How would you describe what we do for your business? (how do we add value)
- What are our USPs, or what makes us special?
- Who do you regard are our competitors?
- How do we differentiate?
- What is your understanding of our mission and purpose?
- What is an area we could improve/what should we concentrate on in the next x years
- Have we changed during the time you have known us, and if so, how?
- How do we communicate with you?
- What could we do to develop, build or strengthen our relationship with you
- What are the biggest threats/challenges facing your organisation at the moment
- What are we like to work with?
Communications is a two-way street, right? At the heart of it, there needs to be an element of dialogue — a way to give feedback, measure … and listen. But it doesn’t need to be any more than rethinking or being more intentional about your everyday interactions with your stakeholder world.
Any business can fall into the habit of ‘drinking the Kool-Aid’, believing the assumptions they’ve made about themselves and how they are positioned in their target market. Some of the bravest founders we’ve met over the years are asking these difficult questions all the time, to make sure they are beta-testing their narrative — and beta-testing their relevance — in a dynamic feedback loop!
If you’ve taken up these three challenges, we’d love to hear from you! Did it throw up any unexpected insights? How are you using that information?
