Don't put a wrench in your initiative's effectiveness - use a toolkit!

San Francisco’s Fairmont Hotel was the site of my “Eureka!” moment (nice place to have one, BTW). It was at a conference there that I realized my new shopper-focused initiative at the consumer packaged goods company I worked for, if done well, could fundamentally transform the loyalty of our retail customers’ best shoppers, in a way that would benefit our brands disproportionately (in the spirit of joint value creation). In that sense, if we could continue to hone our emerging capabilities, we might look like considerable help to these retail partners, setting us up to be a sort of Category Captain in the loyalty “category.”

First, though, we had to become students of loyalty, and in pursuit of that I began traveling the world in search of best practices, from consumer packaged goods and retail, to casinos, airlines, and hotels (including Fairmont’s “President’s Club”). Those discoveries led to my developing a simple conceptual framework that could underlie our approach, as well as several tools and templates that I began to use in pilot projects with our customer teams and their respective retail partners. As we worked through 23 successful pilots, I speculated what would need to be true in order for all of our customer teams to take on this work with their retail partner. After all, we were seeing ROIs of anywhere from 450-700%, so why wouldn’t everyone want to lean into this new thinking to grow sales and profits while nurturing their customer relationship?

The reason, it turned out, was rather obvious. Our customer teams had other fish to fry. Other initiatives, other meetings, other priorities. There just wasn’t enough time in their day to take something like this on, at least not without an additional set of hands. Sure, the concept of loyalty was intuitive to them, but three types of questions continued to crop up:

• Why are we doing this, and what of my existing work should I give up in order to do this?
• What specifically are we looking to accomplish, and how does it fit with our go-to-market strategy?
• If I do take this on, how can I do so in as efficient and easy a way as possible?

The answers to these questions found themselves in a toolkit I eventually published, called Your Loyalty Roadmap, and was designed to equip our teams to lead the very same initiatives with their retail partner that I had been helping many of them with. Part binder/book, part DVD, part memory stick with electronic, customizable worksheets, this toolkit fundamentally extended our reach, not just with North America customer teams but also with our teams and retail partners across the globe. A testament to the joint value creation the toolkit was enabling was this endorsement from a retail CMO: "I’ve paid consultants to help me with this space. What you’ve shared is in a totally different class."

Situations that call for a toolkit

I didn’t think I had done anything all that remarkable, simply put some structure around what might otherwise have been a complex topic, framed the significance of the business opportunity, curated some inspiring success stories from inside/outside our space, and made the whole thing actionable by devising tools, templates, and worksheets. It wasn’t until much later in my career that I realized that toolkits had become my go-to forum for hundreds of initiatives I ultimately led on dozens of brands in as many countries, and even as a board member in the non-profit space. I’d develop a different toolkit to address a multitude of challenges:

• Equipping a team to execute impeccably
• Establishing guardrails or guidelines
• Elevating a certain topic as a strategic imperative
• Introducing a new approach
• Recognizing early wins and fostering “search & reapply”

The “kits” themselves were sometimes in the form of a book, or a binder, or a set of PPT slides, or a laminated “cheat sheet,” or a DVD, or an intranet site. Despite the diversity of kits (or the challenges they addressed), my use of a toolkit as the solution was always in response to a singular, pervasive dynamic I experienced everywhere, and perhaps one that you’ve experienced as well:

In the complex, fast-paced environments we work in, even the most deeply considered and compelling strategy can get lost in translation by folks who don’t fully understand the direction, much less what their role is in driving it into action.

Nailing the perfect toolkit

Of course, I’m not the inventor of the toolkit. They’ve existed for decades, probably longer. They may even pre-date the first actual toolkits that had hammers, screwdrivers, and wrenches in them. But as I’ve deconstructed and dissected hundreds of toolkits from around the world, across industries and functions, I’ve discovered what I believe to be the secret to a perfect toolkit. Turns out the presence or absence of these three ingredients leads to a stark difference in toolkit effectiveness:

The not-so-effective ones tend to omit or neglect one of the three ingredients at their peril:

• Know HOW and WHAT without WHY leads to INERTIA
• Know HOW and WHY without WHAT leads to CONFUSION
• Know WHY and WHAT without HOW leads to FRUSTRATION

Now think back to the loyalty initiative I described earlier, specifically the skepticism expressed by busy team members. What made Your Loyalty Roadmap effective is that, by addressing each of their questions, there was less room for inertia, confusion, or frustration.

• Why are we doing this, and what of my existing work should I give up in order to do this? Know-WHY
• What specifically are we looking to accomplish, and how does it fit with our go-to-market strategy? Know-WHAT
• If I do take this on, how can I do so in as efficient and easy a way as possible? Know-HOW

Have you been the author or recipient of a stellar toolkit?  Or maybe the absence of a toolkit caused an otherwise fantastic initiative to get lost in translation? I’d love to hear about your experiences. Because, while you can’t eliminate the complexity and fast-paced environments you work in, when an important initiative is at stake an effective toolkit can be the balm that enables your folks to navigate and actually thrive in those environments. Perhaps leading to their own type of Fairmont “Eureka!” moment.