I’ve been working through “Click Here,” the new book by Meta CMO Alex Shultz on marketing and advertising, and right at the beginning of chapter 1 he writes:
The most basic advice is to be clear on your goal and how you will measure if you have achieved it.
Alex Schultz, “Click Here” (p. 20)
That sentence triggered something deep in my core. It seems like something so obvious that it shouldn’t even need to be stated, right?
Wrong.
It’s easy to feel like you know what you want, but if you can’t clearly articulate it, that means you don’t really know. You might know that you want more sales, or more accounts, or a game-changing feature, or any other non-specific abstraction.
Unless these abstractions are chiseled into something actionable, they’re daydreams or vague missions, not goals. If I deliver a disguised daydream as a goal to my team, I’m setting myself up for disappointment.
Tylor Neist sent me the perfect visual to illustrate this. When we first started working together, he shared this meme:
Obviously, this particular graphic applies to development, one of the most time intensive and expensive places to be unclear. However, it can be applied to anything that needs to be communicated.
If I hand off something unclear to my team or to contractors, it’s like turning in a manuscript full of plot holes and an unfinished ending. I’m relying on their interpretation of what success looks like. When the output doesn’t match the Mona Lisa in my brain, I’m frustrated and need to spend extra cash to iterate until it’s closer to what I envisioned.
Our job is to rip general thoughts out of an undefined ether and construct a path to success that is tangible.
So let’s start ripping. First, here is Schultz’s hierarchy for campaigns. When you break a project into these six levels, the difference between a mission, a goal, and what actually determines success becomes obvious:
Alex Shultz, “Click Here” (p. 109)
- Mission – What are you trying to achieve as a team, company or organization?
- Strategy – How do you plan to achieve it?
- Tactic – What are the actions you need to take to execute the strategy?
- Goal – What is the outcome expected from the tactic?
- Metric – How do you express that outcome as a number?
- Target – How much do you want that number to move in a given timeframe?”
The picture starts to become clear, but this is also where it can get muddied: “I regularly see stages 3 through 6 conflated with one word: goal. This mostly causes problems when the metric doesn’t accurately describe the goal, which can become a huge issue, as it leads you to think broadly, not precisely” (pg. 109).
Precision is the missing ingredient when you aren’t clear. If you give your team a slab and a chisel, think of precision as the model that sits in front of them.
If I’m intentional through each step in the process, I’ll know if what I think I want actually makes sense to pursue. Then, I’ll know how to measure if the mission was successful.
Fair warning: the mission may change if you truly work through the tactic and goal. These steps reveal if your initial thoughts were viable or need some adjustment.
It’s frustrating when expectations aren’t delivered on, and it takes humility to walk it back and realize you delivered unclear expectations. It’s also frustrating to receive vagueness, build what you think is success, and then have to start over.
Ambiguity is a shield for people who don’t want to commit, or don’t want to admit they don’t know the best path forward. If you’re on the receiving end of it, ask why, break the hierarchy into clear pieces, and get a commitment on what success looks like. This will force clarity and illuminate what’s really wanted.