In this second video of the Customer Mastery series, Jermaine Edwards explains the concept of intrinsic communication—how leaders should use vision and mission to motivate and align both internal teams and customers. He contrasts intrinsic communication with extrinsic communication (covered in video 1) and outlines four core components: the vision’s journey (the path together) and outcome (the end result), and the mission’s why (purpose) and who (people involved). Edwards stresses the importance of regularly discussing these elements, warns that avoiding hard conversations erodes trust, and recommends a 60 % focus on intrinsic (vision/mission) versus 40 % on extrinsic communication. He offers a downloadable workbook to help apply these ideas in meetings and previews the next video on integrating the concepts.
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Hey, it's Jermaine Edwards, your customer growth guide. If you're new, welcome. If you're old, welcome back to the fold. We're in video number 2 of 4 levels of communication in the Customer Mastery series. Now, in video number 1, we talked about extrinsic communication, which is the outward areas that we focus on, the execution and the expectations of teams and customers and customers of us, and how that's really important to focus on the different areas in which we communicate that and how how well we do those things. In this video, we're talking about intrinsic communication, which is those things that motivate and drive the activities that we do. It's all about the why, it's about where we're heading, it's about what we call vision and mission. And that's what we're going to talk about in this video. So let's talk about intrinsic communication. So there are two different levels here, levels 3 and 4, we call them in the IA Group. And what we wanna think about here is the whole idea that in every organization, those organizations that thrive, that are truly engaged together, both with their customers and internally, think about these two areas of communication. How often they think about vision and communicate vision, how often they think about mission and communicate mission. So a quick question before we begin, to what degree or what percentage of your time as a leader or as a customer leader, somebody leading your customers, do you talk about vision and mission? May wanna just hold that question in your mind as we go through this video. So let's talk about vision. So there are two components with inside vision as we think about where we're actually heading with our customers or with our teams directly. And the first piece that we talk about and we want to think about is the whole idea of journey. Where are we going together? What does it actually look like right now? We don't want to avoid the hard conversations. When you're heading and moving on a journey together, you're going to have and face some challenges. You're going to have difficulties, things that you need to overcome. Sometimes it's going to suck, right? It's going to suck. And sometimes you're going to have some really good times. You want to celebrate those different areas. But on the journey, we We want to be really clear that we're communicating that often and not avoiding the conversation. So when things are avoided and get put under the rug, people start to lose trust and confidence in the person that they're communicating with, particularly if that person isn't bringing up the situation themselves. The other part here is outcome. So we want to think about— let's just write this again, shall we? Out— Outcome. Okay, outcome. So outcome is also really important here on the vision. So we not just want to talk about the journey, but actually what is the result of the actual journey itself? What are we actually heading towards? What is the big payoff at the end? What is the big result both for the customer, for your teams, for yourself? Just understand what that is and just be true and honest to what that is. Maybe it's a revenue, maybe it's an impact, particular goal that you have with the customer. Whatever those things are, we want to make sure that we have a healthy degree of conversation around the journey and the outcome. Where are we actually heading? What's the journey like? And what are we actually trying to achieve? The next piece here is around mission. And within mission, there are also two components that we want to consider. Mission is really important because it actually goes slightly deeper than, than vision. It goes to the people involved. And so the first place we want to look and consider is the whole idea of why. Why does this even matter? Why are we doing this? If we aren't connected to that that core and very clear understanding of why, what we'll have is you'll have a team of autonomous automatons, people that you're just, you're feeding information into and they're just throwing it back up to you when you want it. You don't want automatons, robots, you know, androids working in your business. You want people who are feeling, engaging, collaborative, collaborating, getting creative with each other, all those things that really matter to thriving teams. You also wanna do that with your customers as well. Ensure that you're communicating and thinking about, hey, why are we doing this? Why does this actually matter to you, Mr. Customer? How do we think about those communication, those conversations on a daily, weekly, monthly basis? Now, the other part here, I wanna spend a little more time here, and it's perhaps something that we miss most often when we think about communication, that's the who, the people involved that you communicate with on a day-to-day basis. Who is involved? Why do they matter? What is their role? Who in your team, who in your customer's business do you need to appreciate as part of that mission? Why is their role important to the overall success of reaching that specific outcome? How often have you told your team members that, that they're actually important? That the people in your customer's business are really important to you. Regardless if you have experienced it yourself, and I hope that you actually do have somebody pat you on the back and tell you you're doing a great job. But also as a customer leader, we have an obligation to talk about the who, who's on our team, who's in our customer's business, who's in our wider collaborative departments, and talk about why they matter, that who in that team. So if you can hold these two areas together, both with the first two levels of communication in video one, 1, extrinsic communication. We also want to spend time in intrinsic communication. I'd like to argue that it may be a 60/40 split. 60% of this, 40% of the other. Video 1, extrinsic communication, talking about execution and expectation. And 60% of this, vision and mission. And I've got a workbook, obviously, you can download directly to walk you through how to think about applying this in your team meetings and with your customers. And I'll see you in video number 3, where I'm just gonna walk you through how to integrate all this so you can confidently communicate this anytime you want to make sure that your team and your customers are in line with the right things.
