Get to Know the 5 Circles of "Yes"

Once again, at the height of another contentious political season, I have been thinking a lot about one of the key elements of every campaign, successful or not. Persuasion.

I’m talking about both kinds of persuasion: How we, as marketers, are expected to persuade our target audiences to choose our products and prefer our brands; and also how persuasion works internally. How we persuade our teams and colleagues to move projects forward and complete them. And ultimately, how we get to agreement.

Here’s what I’m realizing: External and internal persuasion are part of the same continuum. And ultimately, our focus should not be on how we get there, but who will get us there. The key to building consensus and driving action around anything, from the big issues of the campaign to what your family wants for dinner, all depends on who you are approaching and in what order. For us marketers, this takes a very specific path that I’ve seen successfully replicated over and over. It’s concentric circles within concentric circles, a process always building out to encompass more people than before. First, the internal circles:

• You start small with your natural allies. These are your closest colleagues—your team. Why? Not for the reason you think, not because they are more likely to agree with you. Instead, it’s because they are good checks and balances for you. Because they trust you and you trust them so you’ll get very good feedback from them. They’ll help you find your blind spots. They’ll help you pinpoint who else needs to join your coalition. Whether at work or in our private lives, agreement starts small. Going too big too fast is a recipe for failure.
• Next, you go one step out, outside your boss and your team to the larger marketing and sales organizations. You bring in everyone who touches the customer experience. Start with “what am I missing?” Start with “would this benefit you?” Start with “how much work does this create for you?” Build that broader consensus.
• Then go outside your comfort zone to folks with whom you might not work regularly: Legal, IT, anyone who could potentially be a blocker or have an objection or have a roadmap that might be disrupted by your ideas. B2C projects have B2B implications, and vice-versa (which is why I fundamentally don’t believe there is a difference between the two anymore, read about that here), so never forget to sequence your coalition-building to account for anyone whose work will be impacted by the project you want to see through.

And that’s just the first part—as I said, circles within circles within circles! That’s how you get to internal alignment; again, it’s a function of who, not what. How you sequence your campaign, like any campaign, is just as important (if not more!) than it’s content.

For steps 4 and 5, you must reach external audiences, so the number of people inside the circles gets much bigger very quickly:

• You bring your customers into the fold. Maybe you’ve rebranded and you are trying to steer the business in a new direction—that’s only going to stick with customers if everyone internally is on board first (I think we’ve all seen ambitious rebrands that fizzled because internal coordination didn’t stick). If everyone inside is a yes, you’ve hit on something authentic and true to the brand, and the customer will likely recognize that and be a fast follow.
• And lastly, you guessed it: everyone else you are trying to persuade. Like, everyone else in the whole wide world. That's likely to be millions. Maybe even tens or hundreds of millions, and depending on the product or service you are marketing, it may even be over one billion. It’s ridiculous and presumptuous to think this way, but let me explain what I mean: if you want to reach press or policy makers, or to open the eyes of thought leaders around the world to the great work you are doing, you have to have your company and your customer in line first. Lots of folks try to skip ahead, launching that thought leadership social campaign trying to grab at headlines without having built a strong foundation first. It’s slow. It takes time, but you’ll get those headlines if you work through the first four circles of yes first, because your voice will already be primed to be amplified by the thousands of other voices within those first four circles.

Ultimately, this is what we see every election season as well, politicians looking for votes, working through the concentric circles -- their inner circles, their sure-thing political base, those in their party who doubt them, and then swing-voters and beyond -- to build their coalitions bigger and stronger than the next candidate. In business, that’s our goal too, and putting in the sometimes slow, sometimes frustrating work of creating alignment is the most effective way we have to move projects forward.

Focus on the who; the rest will follow.