Getting Buy-In For Your Vision

Just like getting to the “why” is a powerful tool to find your inspiring message to enroll others - so is the today/tomorrow framework. You can ask yourself 3 questions:

1. Where are we today?
2. Where do we want to be?
3. How do we get there?

For example:

1. Today we are generating our leads through forms on landing pages
2. We want to get to a world where submitting your contact details is easy and unobtrusive
3. We experiment with chatbots and lead ads

Getting people excited means to get attention. This means to use language that awakens emotions in people and makes them want to get in motion. It means to use simple and easy understandable language that immediately ‘clicks’ with people. It should be high level as opposed to specific. It should embrace big thinking as opposed to detailed focus. Inspirational language sets a positive, hopeful tone and is inclusive of the audience. Not using such inspirational language may not trigger emotions of excitement and create the same spark in people and readiness to roll up their sleeves. Also, be aware that inspiring language is part of getting people excited, whilst there are other aspects introduced in the next section that support people’s believe in a vision.

People, who act on a vision are those, who believe in that change. It is important to support people’s believe by making the outlook of the results of that change tangible and realistic. Depending on what the given vision is, practical ways to do so are by sharing a case study of another company that has achieved something similar before, or by including screenshots or images. In some cases maybe even a brief, high-level Loom session can support people’s ability to have an image in mind. Depending on the vision, a vivid story about the aspired state for the business can also lead people to visualize this aspired state.

Try to create a strong image about the benefits of that change. Referring back to the previous example of the landing page form, you could use a less than 10 secs long video of a form submission on a website, which has already found a very easy way for people submitting their contact details such as a chatbot. The story around this is that, if it takes only about half of the time to submit contact details that instead of the currently 300 people daily, possibly 500 people will fill out the form and this will lead to huge business improvement. This is an example of how visualization support can be used to paint a clearer picture of an opportunity and how the right story around this can highlight the tangible, potential business impact resulting from this.

Enrolling others in your vision is key to gaining buy in and trust. Co-creation energises your team, gains commitment and provides direction.

Ownership enables trust and responsibility so you’ll need to be ok with changing your vision and allowing others to shape it.

A good practice here is:

1. Begin by creating a strong vision independently.
2. Present your vision to your team during a collaborative session, gain feedback and input.
3. Then go away again independently to analyze.