It takes time to get your message right

Brendan Dowling explains how getting your message isn't easy - but it is critical:

Making your slide deck as short and punchy as possible will take time. For example, it took me the best part of three years to define my latest product offering as:

Customer Relationship Engagement (CRE), which allows an enterprise to engage its customers in two-way communications that are targeted, personalized and permission-based.

I went through a lot of mumbo-jumbo before I got to this wording, but I kept working at it, trying versions that did not quite convey the right message. At one stage I awakened unwanted competition when I used the term ‘customer relationship management’ (CRM). I was always looking for feedback, and trying to break away from a crowded market to find a new ‘blue ocean’ that we could dominate as a small start-up.

Although this takes time to get right, when you achieve it the words will sound so natural, they will become part of the language of everyone in your organization and beyond (your customers, suppliers, investors, etc.). Keep going back to the words you use and the conclusions you make until they are so concise and understandable that everyone is perfectly clear about what you are trying to convey. 

Extracted from ACCELERATING COMPANY GROWTH: A PRACTICAL GUIDE FOR CEOs by Brendan Dowling.