Why your Impact Identity is critical to the speed you win talent, funding and customers
From innovation to growth.
Innovation and enterprise focussed organisations have a unique set of hurdles to overcome on their path to impact and growth. Clearing those hurdles requires you to take an outside-in perspective.
Any organisation, commercial or otherwise, looking to scale must at some point make the leap from engaging early adopters to building traction with a wider audience. But achieving impact and growth against the current economic backdrop requires clearing a series of additional hurdles. Top amongst these (according to Astley Media’s Tech Leaders Brand Insight Report 2021) are:
Skills Shortages. You’re competing for scarce competencies that others also desire.
Access to Funding. The flow of funds now isn’t what it was pre-Brexit, pre-pandemic, pre-economic storm.
Market not maturing. The potential of complex innovation can get lost in translation, stalling demand and slowing the shift to self-funded business models.
It may seem self-evident that your innovation mindset is your secret weapon in this regard. After all, your innovation capability is genuinely outstanding. It’s creating breakthrough solutions to persistent problems. The case for working for you / investing in you / partnering with you / buying from you is compelling. You can wax lyrical about it all day. It’s an obvious winner!
Er, no.
In reality, the audiences you’re targeting - talent, investors, partners, buyers - won’t have your depth of knowledge and expertise. What’s obvious to you on the inside is far from obvious to someone outside looking in.
They may not recognise the problem you provide the solution for.
If they do, they may have more familiar or readily-available resources and processes to turn to.
They don’t know why they should work for you, invest in you, partner with you or buy from you.
All of this equates to risk. Risk they need not take.
That’s because they’re not thinking about what you do. They’re focussed on their own goals and ambitions, and de-risking their route to achieving them. To grow, you’re asking many different people to take a leap of faith. People rarely leap unless they’re sufficiently confident about what lies on the other side. They need to be clear, however uncertain the footing, that it’s an opportunity to move closer to achieving their own end goal. All this means viewing the leap from their side of the chasm. You have to stand in their shoes to truly understand their priorities, drivers, motivations and pain points.
That’s why we’re taking an outside-in perspective from recruiters, investors and buyers and diving into why brand power adds the essential athleticism required to clear the talent, funding and market obstacles to increasing impact.
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