- Acknowledge and adapt that we are becoming a values-driven society. This is not unique to technology: customers are paying greater attention to your business values and how they are lived internally and externally to your company. But it is especially true in the world of technology, where competing on features and function alone is becoming increasingly irrelevant as applications and platforms become both ubiquitous and easy to adopt. If you aren’t paying attention to what’s going on in your country and the world, you’ll be left behind. Doing your work in the narrowest swim lane possible is no longer viable – you’re part of a bigger current. Whether or not you choose to articulate and live your values is what gives you agency in this new world. Doing nothing and remaining “agnostic” to values actually creates more division as mission-driven organizations find contradiction in what you say and how you act. You can’t have your cake and eat it, too. Choose to help shape the world instead of withdrawing from it, and you will attract customers that might not have chosen you based on feature/function capability alone.
- Serving impact organizations is an investment. Nonprofit, Education, Sustainability, Equality, and even Public Sector are not just another vertical. When you invest in mission-driven work as part of your operations, you elevate more than one customer at a time. Otherwise, it’s just another transaction on a ledger (see the point above about Values). The tricky part here is understanding how this changes the projections of growth and performance of a business over time – it gives a little in the short-term to reap a lot more in the long term. The constraints of the business world frequently favor the opposite: maximize the short-term and invest in the long term. The common denominator here is your business will thrive on this investment over time, and your impact and mission-driven customers are generally looking to make long-term investments in their constituencies.
- Recognize that the priority of impact work is not profit, but change over time. Impact organizations think structurally, they want to create durable changes for their constituencies that aren’t going to be flash-in-the-pan moments. To the point above, if you engage with these organizations on their terms, match your sales, marketing, and growth cycles to their needs, you will become a leader. In a world of changemakers, it is ideas, actions, thought leadership, and information that are the currencies. Your business can show up by having a solid CSR and ESG strategy, so your customers can clearly see that their dollars aren’t merely feeding rote profit, but also being used responsibly by you.
- There is strength in diversity. This applies both to how your business treats its own staff, and how it focuses on partnerships. When you apply inclusionary practices to your business, countless studies have shown that they produce better outcomes for your customers – including how your staff are able to show up for both you and them. If you lead with your domain expertise outside your business, not simply rote technology expertise, and apply this to your ecosystems and partnerships strategy, you’ll also create a more diverse platform of opportunity and revenue. Additionally, shaping partnership programs towards elevating businesses themselves and giving additional opportunity to businesses led by underrepresented people will create more loyal and diverse ecosystems around you.
- Know the various ways “competition” shows up in your deal cycles. Who is your real competitor when selling to impact organizations? You may think it’s the service provider, application, or platform that looks like you – and to some degree this is true – but it’s missing the mark. Your real competitor is often the mission of the organization to which you are selling, which is always going to be the number one priority of its staff. This is why your domain expertise is critical: it allows you to navigate the waters of understanding between you and your customers, regardless of the technology solution being proposed. Knowing the reality of mission-driven organizations is your best ally in bridging the gap between an investment that otherwise runs the risk of looking like time and money taken away from constituents. It’s no longer possible to pull rabbits out of hats and say that many things can be accomplished with pure technology solutions alone: it is very possible that your technology or services is exactly what an organization needs, but they can’t see a path between it and maintaining the focus on their mission. Start with the outcomes an organization truly wants, and work your way backwards instead of starting with technology and working your way forward. Along the way, don’t forget the people who comprise these organizations, and their very real needs for adoption, change capacity, and growth.
Amy Rose is the Founder & CEO of Three Little Birds, an agency dedicated to improving outcomes for businesses and the impact organizations they serve.