Blog
Thinking Bigger with your Vision, your Board and your Funding
We’ve been on the road doing a lot of training and speaking the last two weeks. While in Albany at NYCON’s Money for Mission I packaged some content in a new way to focus exclusively on the importance of THINKING BIG.
Conference Session Title: Thinking BIGGER – With your Vision, With your Board and With your Funding.
Some of the FRAMEWORKS used:
Here are few nuggets and remainders/reminders from the session.
Go back up to 30,000’.
Planes fly at 30,000’. It’s an altitude at which you can see ‘the big picture.’ Offers blue sky thinking, vision, etc. Making you aware of 30,000’ we can then also discuss 14,000’ and 3’. Think of these as VISION – STRATEGY and TACTICS respectively. Most of us communicate at the 14,000’ and 3’ level. The BIG sale, the BIG vision, the BIG conversations happen at 30,000’.
On Strategic Plans:
Really tough to talk about where you’re going to go at 14,000’ if we don’t have consensus and clarity at 30,000’.
We spend every day at 3’.
Your prospects don’t. We have a context for every detail [[in OUR heads]] but when we communicate in the details (without first having clarity/framing at the higher levels) it sounds a bit like the school teacher from Charlie Brown.
The Steve Jobs Close
I use this one a lot. Love it.
The story: 1984. Apple board looking for a new ‘seasoned and readied CEO’ (I guess they didn’t think Steve Jobs knew what he was doing.) They zeroed in on John Scully – VP of Pepsi. Spent some time with him talking about market segments, HR, product lines, business plan, etc — the 14,000′ and 3′ pieces. He eventually turned them down. Steve Jobs goes for a walk with Scully and asks one (30,000’) question, “Do you want to sell sugar water to kids all your life or do you want to change the world?” Scully signs up for Apple. Incidentally, that didn’t work out so well. It turned out Steve Jobs was a pretty good leader after all. But, that’s a different story.
Asking for $1M.
We need to actually be able to communicate what we would do with $1M. Simple concept.
Getting Buy-In at 30,000’.
If someone’s not buying in or on at 30,000’ then you can’t move on to the strategy and the tactics of how they can help (the ask). However, once they do, you can move to these levels.
People respond to the level at which you communicate
Going to talk about blue prints? Everyone will talk about the angle of the door. Or, you can talk about the VISION. Your choice.
Not saying don’t have 14,000’ and 3’.
Just need to know the flow. Remember – there is an order: CAST a VISION. STAFF a VISION. FUND a VISION. Can’t fund a vision you don’t have 🙂
Think BIG actually makes things EASIER
