I’ve had red curly hair all my life, and I often joke it’s the source of all my superpowers. Cut the hair and there’s no more iDea Guy – no more action hero. For that reason, if you see photos of me you will always see some longish red curly hair. Could you gain marketing superpowers for your business just by putting on a red curly wig?

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. However, as explained in the 4 Disciplines of Execution, you can supercharge your marketing with a WIG: Wildly Important Goal.

Covey’s WIG principle means focusing on less for the purpose of accomplishing more. The theory is that narrowing the focus of your marketing team (or any other team) to one important goal – or very few goals – can help you achieve them even as you navigate the whirlwind of your normal business day.

Chris McChesney, co-author of the 4 Disciplines of Execution, says, “There will always be more good ideas than there is capacity to execute.” It’s not easy to turn away from any good idea, but that’s exactly what you have to do to create the focus necessary to accomplish one goal at a time.

The Franklin Covey website states that research shows only 15% of employees know their organization’s most important goals. “Either there are no goals or they have too many goals.” Focusing on a WIG can help you solve this problem for your own organization.

According to McChesney, to execute a WIG, you must:

• Start with one goal; focus on a single aspect of business you want to significantly improve
• Avoid saying yes to all good ideas
• Avoid turning everything in the whirlwind of your day into a goal
• Choose a WIG you can’t achieve through your normal course of business
• Choose a WIG that represents the most critical gap in your business
• Choose a WIG that is important AND represents a performance gap or risk
• Choose only one WIG per person
• Define where you are now, where you want to be, and by when (single performance measure)
• Commit the time weekly to work on achieving your current WIG
• Once you achieve the goal, you still can work on it, but insert it into your daily work and choose another WIG

Working on a WIG doesn’t mean neglecting normal operations. However, McChesney suggests routine tasks should take up only about 80% of your day. You should give 20% of your day to WIGs that will “make all the difference” until they can be incorporated into your daily business.

When we were building the yorCMO system and establishing our 6 Fundamentals of Marketing, it made sense to use the concept of a two-year WIG in the first fundamental: “Know Where You’re Going.” A WIG related to this aspect of your business can help you focus and drive marketing results. If you combine it with the scorecard and weekly check-in in the fifth fundamental, “Cadence for Planning and Accountability,” you are more likely to achieve your WIG.

At yorCMO, our own marketing WIGs are mostly sales goals. These are important to us because one of our core values is Marketing Drives Sales. Our clients have different WIGs tailored to their own businesses. Here are a few to get you thinking:

• A dentist is focused on increasing the number of dollars per chair from $X to $Y by 2020
• A senior living facility wants to raise occupancy from 80% to 90% by 2020 (we actually hit this goal within six months)
• A department store chain targeted a decrease in shrinkage from X% to Y% by June 2020

Never fear – you don’t need red curly hair like mine to get marketing superpowers if you know how to properly set and execute WIGs, whether you use them in the yorCMO system or your own system.

For more information about the 4 Disciplines of Execution, visit the4disciplinesdofexecution.com. To learn about incorporating WIGs in the yorCMO system, Contact me! .

About the Author:

Joe is co-founder of yorCMO. Prior to founding yorCMO in 2017, he began pioneering video for new media in 2007, writing the book, New Media Habits, and launching the first company to focus exclusively on new media video production in Omaha, NE. It took him 6 years of trial and error to find the right niche in the sea of social media – strategic video production for nonprofits; then 3 years of tinkering to develop a sustainable business model. Frost Media Group operates in both Omaha and Kansas City.