Aligning ESG Benefits with Executives’ Top 10 Priorities
What is the secret of selling executives on using sustainability strategies? Show how the benefits of those strategies help them achieve their existing priorities on which they are already being measured. Executives are juggling way too many key focus areas to welcome adding another one like “sustainability” to the batch. That means sustainability champions need to align the set of benefits that are yielded by smart environmental, social, and governance (ESG) / sustainability strategies with executives’ top priorities.
A survey done by Forrester in Q4 of 2010 provides us with a helpful list of executives’ priorities. A cross-section of 2,691 business senior executives in Europe, North America, and Asia were asked to name their top two priorities for 2011. The “% Selecting” column shows how many respondents included each selection among their top two choices. At first glance, the list is disappointing to sustainability champions: improving ESG / sustainability is ranked 10th–lowest on the list, trumped by revenue growth, efficiencies, innovation, and employee engagement issues.
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But wait …
The phrase “Sell the sizzle, not the steak” is an old sales adage. When we buy a light bulb, we don’t really want a light bulb, we want the light it provides. When selling sustainability-related strategies to for-profit companies, we need to ensure we are selling the business benefits that they enable, more than the co-benefits they provide for the environment and society. As the Forrester survey results suggest, corporate decision makers will be more inclined to embrace sustainability strategies because they help attain their other top nine priorities, more than to “improve corporate environmental sustainability and social responsibility” per se.
To entice companies toward Stage 4 on their sustainability journeys (see my July 27, 2010 blog, The 5-Stage Sustainability Journey) we need to show how ESG-related strategies align with their existing, high priority, business goals. The slide opposite matches the benefits of ESG strategies with the categories of priorities from the Forrester study. This is the magic of the sustainability sale — it’s not about sustainability. It’s about helping companies achieve their business priorities. Sustainability is simply the means to those ends.
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To make it easy for executives to see the relevance of sustainability-related strategies, we need to map their benefits against frameworks with which executives are already comfortable. This week, we mapped them against executive’s priorities. Over the next few weeks, we’ll look at three more business frameworks to consider using:
1. The standard income statement framework
2. The standard business case framework
3. The standard value chain framework
Stay tuned …
Bob
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