This article features hand-picked strategy experts who will present at Utah Business Forward. With five distinct tracks covering entrepreneurship, international business, marketing, people & culture and strategy, this dynamic event will be hosted on November 16, 2023, at the Grand America Hotel in Salt Lake City. Click here to learn more about the event.

Some of the most important lessons in business are learned through failure, as Steve Carlile learned at a key moment in his career. 

Carlile was working as a marketing executive at a large, multinational consumer products company when he was tasked with leading the process of developing a plan for getting the entire enterprise better aligned and working as a single team. This was a plum assignment because it entailed extensive engagement with company leadership at the highest levels. 

After many weeks and many more meetings, Carlile was off to a great start. 

“We were aligned as a group, and the CEO was fully bought into it,” Carlile recalls. “But we didn’t have the right stakeholders in the room during the strategy’s development. As a result, moving into the implementation stage, we ran into friction all over the place, mostly by people who had been consulted along the way but never felt like they were a part of it and lacked the holistic view.”

In the end, that group of leaders—the ones who knew just enough about the process to feel left out of it—began poking holes in Carlile’s hard work, leading to second-guessing by the CEO and the eventual disintegration of the plan.

A few years later, Carlile got another chance. He was not about to make the same mistake.

“When I tried again, I was adamant that we give more leaders—especially leaders over different geographies—a seat at the table. I made sure everybody was crystal clear on the value of what we were working to achieve as a brand,” Carlile says. “Looking back, our plan in the first example was the stronger of the two, but the second was much more successful because it had buy-in. If you don’t have that buy-in and alignment, things will inevitably unravel somewhere along the line.”

Assemble the right team 

While achieving buy-in is a foundational challenge, Carlile says it’s one of several that must be successfully managed if an organization is to develop an effective holistic corporate strategy. The first step is assembling the right team, ideally with whomever is responsible for delivering on the company’s core value proposition at the helm. With their deep knowledge of buyer personas and access to analytics, that’s usually the head of customer experience (CX).

At DIME Beauty, that person is Director of Retention Alejandra Salomon, who describes her level of interest in skincare, brand strategy and persona-driven market segmentation as “obsessive.”

“CX is definitely the right place to start when building a holistic strategy because every department touches it. If I’m on a sinking boat, we all are,” Salomon says.

To Salomon, the primacy of buy-in goes beyond how the organization receives the holistic strategizing process and eventual output. She feels buy-in must begin with the brand itself. 

“If you’re truly bought into the brand, you’re naturally going to want to buy into the mission and do whatever is needed to grow it. So, the main focus needs to be defining the brand voice and mission,” Salomon says.

Having devised a plan for optimizing the brand identity and customer journey, the next step is to zoom out.

“You have to understand the broader marketplace you’re operating in,” Carlile says. “That requires answering the question, ‘Where else can [our customers] go?’ And that’s where competitive and macro intelligence come in.”

Gather macro and competitive intelligence 

Joana McKenna has made a career leading companies in the notoriously dynamic e-commerce sector. She says an accurate understanding of external factors influencing the market is vital.

“Taking the holistic approach to business strategy requires understanding the impact of what’s happening out in the world at a macro level and how those factors are affecting the company’s employees, initiatives and especially customers. That means analyzing economic, political, social and technological factors because they all matter,” McKenna says. “Then you layer competitive intelligence on, which allows leaders to better understand what obstacles other teams are up against and even come up with creative solutions when they otherwise might never have the opportunity. Giving every business leader a voice in this process creates that feeling of buy-in and gets everybody looking at the business holistically.”