Does your sales pitch presentation have mockups instead of the product itself?
Most often, products are sold using mockups. The reasons are valid: not enough money to build the product itself.
Concept selling is great salesmanship but not great branding. So you need to choose how long will you live with concept selling over value showcasing because…
Salesmanship will take you to the shore during a storm, but branding will bring together collective power to fix the ship and take you back home, safe.
If your brand and community cannot speak a shared language which is the ‘product’, then keep the common topic as the Vision.
Here is where it becomes important to establish a Roadmap and constantly communicate about it’s progress with your community.
Quoting back:
A roadmap is your vision articulated with literally milestone flags stuck on it. Have you noticed global CEOs writing a book as soon as they are announced publicly as the CEO of a company?
I remember when Bill Gates wanted to pivot, he wrote the book The Road Ahead. And I read this book when I was a student who left a great impact on me. Satya Nadella wrote the book Hit Refresh.
The most recent book that I subscribed to is Indra Nooyi’s biography, ‘My life in full’.
Similarly, I have read books by many CEOs and C-suite members who have tied their personal brand to their organizational brand. The examples can go on from The everything store for Amazon, Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg, Ashlee Vance’s book on Elon Musk, Nike founder – Phil Knight wrote a memoir called Shoe Dog, and the list can go on.
You would definitely need a war room or, rather, a green room backstage that brings all these tools, tales, and tricks of the trade together.