Strategy before story
Your health organization’s story is only as strong as the strategy beneath it.
Ideas
A campaign or sales story can only carry the strategy it’s given. Shannon Langrand on the choices that have to come first, and where the proof for them usually hides.
When a healthcare organization calls us, the request is usually specific. They want a new positioning statement, a campaign or a sales narrative — and they want it ASAP.
Those are reasonable things to ask for. But each one is a way of telling the market why it should choose you, and each one is only as strong as the strategic choices underneath it. Most organizations haven't finalized those choices yet when they pick up the phone.
When we help a client build a growth strategy and the story that carries it, we work through four steps in order. The positioning statement comes out of the first three. The campaign or sales narrative the client called about is the fourth, and it only works once the others are done.
Four steps to a story that holds up
These steps are sequential. Each one answers a question the next one depends on. Skip ahead, and the story suffers.
1. SEE THE SHIFT THAT MATTERS TO YOUR BUSINESS
What is changing right now around your customer, buyer, member or category that really matters?
Our clients don’t have to wait months for us to get up to speed on this step. We come into the first conversation with a point of view on what’s changing across healthcare. Our futurists track the signals of longer-term change, and our healthcare team has worked across the industry for two decades.
Knowing what's changing is the easier half of this step. The harder half is discernment. Some important drivers of change will have zero relevance to your business. We work collaboratively with clients to lay out the key drivers moving through their industry, then map each one to the strategy and where they want to go. What emerges is a view of change built for their particular market opportunity.
That kind of discernment is hard to find from inside an organization. It’s a bit like trying to read a whole room from the center of a crowded dance floor. My quarterly note to our team is titled "View from the balcony" for that reason. You have to get an elevated view to make smart decisions.
2. FIND YOUR JIMI HENDRIX MOMENT
Where does that shift intersect with something your organization is unusually equipped to do?
Sometimes the client already knows what that is. Often they don't, or they've taken it for granted for so long that it stopped looking special.
I often tell clients about an interview I saw years ago with one of the Monkees. The band toured with Jimi Hendrix early in his career, and he remembered that Hendrix worried he wasn't a good singer. Anyone who loves Hendrix knows the singing was the least important part of what he brought to the stage. People came to watch him play the guitar.
Every organization has its own version of that. If the guitar playing is what makes you extraordinary, we're not going to spend our energy worrying about the singing. Part of our job is helping a client find their Jimi Hendrix moment — the one thing they do so well that it should shape everything else.
3. PROVE IT WITH EVIDENCE HIDING IN YOUR ORGANIZATION
What evidence would a sophisticated buyer need before they believe your advantage is real? Proof is where this work most often stalls. The evidence almost always exists, but it's hidden somewhere in the organization, and when we start working with a client, they've often cast a very narrow net for it.
So we cast a wider one.
Connect us to the smartest data scientist on your team, or the person everyone calls when they have a hard question. Let us talk to the head of your care management program and to someone in customer service. Healthcare is a business, so we tend to think of proof in strictly quantitative terms. But sometimes the proof is a story. Sometimes it's in how something comes together across teams, or in a single pilot that demonstrates something important to the organization.
Bringing more voices into the process gives us a much richer body of evidence to build the story on.
What started as a request for a sales story turns into a shared reference point for how the business decides to grow.
4. MAKE IT TRAVEL BEYOND MARKETING
How do you turn those choices into something the whole business can use? You build the sales story, the way leaders talk about the organization, the partnerships it pursues and its go-to-market plan from the same set of decisions — so every part of the business is working from the same choices.
This is the step clients usually ask for first. But if you skip to the end, you’ll write a story without the strategic underpinnings to hold up over time.
Done in the right order, this foundational strategy work becomes a force multiplier. We see it again and again: what started as a request for a sales story turns into a shared reference point for how the business decides to grow.
Shannon Langrand
Founder, CEO
Shannon is dedicated to helping senior leaders in highly dynamic industries to innovate and solve problems in the face of change.
Curious what’s next?
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