What is a Corporate Identity, Pitch, and Core Story?
A corporate identity includes many different parts, but none more important than your corporate pitch and a fantastic Core Story. They serve an extremely valuable purpose as the central organizing ingredient of any company. A great Corporate Identity can dramatically improve training, client access, closing ratios, profitability, and more. The one absolute in business is consistency and efficiency, and a well-researched and executed Corporate Identity will stimulate both at every turn.
In the corporate race efficiency and consistency are analogous to speed. Those that understand this win the race. It’s that simple. We would all agree if every time you make a sale you lose money, consistency is the quickest way to the poor house. The opposite is also true. When you have a great product or service and a financial model that turns a profit, consistency is the equivalent of speed, and those entrepreneurs, executives, managers, and salespeople that get it slaughter their competition no matter what the industry. Having a great Core Story and corporate pitch can accomplish efficiency and consistency like no other business marketing strategy.
Efficiency and consistency are the biggest byproduct of creating and implementing a great Core Story and are one of the last free things the business world has to offer. It is generated by brainpower, not dollars, and every move you make toward greater efficiency and consistency is money that goes directly into your pocket.
A great Core Story does all this and more. It creates the organizational centerpiece that all business core profit centers coalesce. Your Core Story will use market and industry data to create a corporate story that acts as a retention assistant and motivator, and once created, will supercharge training new personnel, and teach salespeople and other employees all the subtleties of why prospects should buy your product or service. It will set the buying criteria for prospecting your best buyers, establish you as your industry leader, and align every aspect of your business profitability. Since consistency and efficiency are #1, implementing a great Core Story as part of your identity is the most important step any company can take toward growing profits by doing things smarter–not working harder.
What Can a Killer Core Story Do?
Anytime we work with entrepreneurs and business executives there are two critical ideas we want to define. First, is that there are only 24 hours in a day that we can work. The second is that only 3% of your total addressable marketing (TAM) is buying what you are selling at any given moment. Once this is the basis of the reality for the current environment it becomes obvious if you want to supercharge sales, dramatically increase closing ratios, and quadruple profits, it can only come to fruition via smarter thinking, more innovative strategies, and the creativity of the managers and entrepreneurs running the company.
Being the best at something is not about learning to do 5000 things, it’s about doing a few things 5000 times consistently and efficiently. This is most important for entrepreneurs and managers in the business world. As great as Michael Jordan was, and I’m a New York Knick fan, rest assured he took millions of jump shots so that he would be the greatest when the moment of truth arrived. And as flamboyant and spectacular as he was, to win championships, he had to learn to consistently be the best at a few things and trust that others around him could do the same. Great businesspeople, like anyone great, must be consistent and efficient, and confident enough to always surround themselves with giants. As the great David Ogilvy wrote to all of his new managers, “If you hire people who are smaller than you we will become a small company full of dwarves. But if you have the courage to hire people that are bigger than you are, we will become a great company full of giants.” A great Core Story will help every level of executive laser focus on what they are great at and support the confidence to employ superstars at every level, in every position.
Zappos, one of the USA’s fastest-growing companies, has a policy of paying TRAINEES $4000 to leave after training. This was part of their corporate identity and core story. It said to every new employee if they weren’t completely sold on the culture and Core Story of the company, they would not be the greatest fit. This is because the CEO knew having loyal dedicated superstars who believed in Zappo’s culture of customer service was the path to success, and it was worth paying new hires to leave if they weren’t dedicated.
A great Corporate Identity sets the stage to accomplish all this with one incredible business tool, the Core Story. It creates the basis for easy sales rapport and consistency throughout many company departments, and when implemented as the central internal corporate message, it naturally works its way to prospects, clients, and even your competition. Imagine being positioned in your marketplace where the competition has to hear from you before making important decisions.
What Happens When You Implement Your Core Story?
When you implement your Corporate Identity internally with your employees and future employees 5 things immediately happen:
- Creates corporate unanimity and consistency.
- Stimulate the Core Profit Centers to all move in the same direction.
- Establishes you as the Leader in your industry
- Sets the internal corporate environment.
When you present your Core Story to prospects and clients two things happen:
- You will favorably alter prospects buying criteria or biases by utilizing research, information, fear, and excitement.
- You will gain unqualified credibility, respect, and trust by demonstrating your depth of knowledge of the marketplace, and your understanding of their business – not because you sold them on price, features, and customization of your products and services.
Building a killer corporate identity, pitch and story isn’t easy. But creating greatness never is. If you want to be the ultimate player in your industry, you must take the time and carefully craft a corporate identity using research data as a powerful access vehicle to motivate those presently looking for what you are selling, and also stimulates those that aren’t aware they need you RIGHT NOW. A well-crafted Core Story will not only connect with your existing consumers but gets the attention of new prospects, your internal team, and your competition.