How to get buy-in for your ideas
Who has total freedom in their careers to do anything they choose? Choice and control seem to define entrepreneurship, but over the last three years since moving from corporate roles and startup roles into building my own things, I’ve learned that the stakeholders just changed. I have fewer “internal” stakeholders, and almost exclusively need to persuade and navigate external stakeholders: readers, listeners, subscribers, clients, sponsors, and more.
I hated the need to always get buy-in for my ideas when working in-house. But that need hasn’t gone away. It’s just shifted and evolved. The ability to persuade and to convince (or said in a less “icky” way perhaps, the need to show others why my ideas should be adopted) continues to serve me well. It continues to be part of the job.
It turns out that, in any job, the job is both the job AND getting buy-in from others to do the job.
Nowhere does this feel more painful then when we want to promote change in our organizations and industries. Arguably the biggest change marketers need to make today is to shift their approach from focusing on grabbing attention to focusing on holding it.
After all, great marketing isn’t about who arrives. It’s about who stays.
When that’s our goal, the sporadic shipping of campaigns or pieces of content simply won’t cut it. We need a better vehicle, built expressly to hold attention, serve audiences before ourselves, and grow through experience and word-of-mouth.
I believe creating original shows is the best path to doing this: podcasts and video series.
But there we once again find ourselves having to get buy-in: from bosses, from peers, from audiences.
As a result, all month long in November, we’re publishing several articles and resources per week on Marketing Showrunners. (MSR is the media company I founded earlier this year to cover and advance the craft of marketers making great shows.)
Today, we officially kick off the month by publishing the world’s biggest list of brands with shows. You can find that here. You can also watch a video trailer of the entire month featuring me and the MSR team, followed by our entire editorial calendar of what’s coming this month. That’s here.
Lastly, you can subscribe to our newsletter, MSR Monthly, which shares one big idea on the last Friday of each month, with a roundup of our best stuff from the prior weeks. Throughout November, this is a weekly email, containing everything we’ve published in one place, plus exclusive invitations to hang out on live video calls with me. Subscribe for free here.
See you all November long for Make the Case Month.