Scott Davis, author of The Shift

Step 1: Get Alignment
Get alignment that this is something the organization can benefit from and that there is merit in embarking on this path. Smart CEOs may want to think more about their three- to five-year strategy, but in reality, they are tied to short-term quarterly pressures or have little experience in leading this type of dialogue or other priorities, so many never actually get to it. When they are approached on the topic, they may talk about revenue targets and expansion efforts but not specific strategies to get there.

If this is the case for your organization, the CEO will embrace the notion of engaging his or her team on the topic of long-term strategy and growth and will embrace the idea of someone else stepping up to lead the team through the process. Some marketers specifically ask for permission to lead, others hijack time set aside to review marketing to start the dialogue, and others take the organization through a Gantt chart type of process with milestones, activities, and responsibilities all outlined. Regardless of the spark, getting alignment on the importance of the dialogue and getting it started is the first step.

Step 2: Equip the C-Suite to Engage in the Dialogue in a Meaningful Way
Mark Gambill, CMO of CDW, a leading provider of technology products and services, had a vision that to really engage the leadership team at the level he wanted, he would have to plant seeds along the way. He would need to have frequent conversations, work sessions, and updates on the segmentation, positioning, and competitor analysis work he was leading, all the while knowing that certain executives in his organization would be able to truly participate in a longer-term discussion on strategy only if they were grounded in the facts first. He needed to address a slew of questions:

• Which segments of the market are we winning with today, and why?
• What types of customers are looking for an end-to-end technology solution rather than just a product?
• How big is the market opportunity?
• How are you defining the market opportunity?
• What brand equities do we own, aspire to own, can never own, and don't ever want to own?

The more upfront engagement, debate, and education you arm your peers with, the more fruitful the strategic dialogue down the road will be. Whether this is a six-week, six-month, or year-long process depends on the profile of your executive team, the relationships that exist at the C-level, and how ready these executives are to engage in the process.

Step 3: Start and Lead the Dialogue
It may seem obvious, but getting the dialogue going and truly leading the discussion of what the company can become is not as easy a topic to launch into as it first might appear to be. This dialogue will be somewhat informed by your current profile and all of the data with which you have carefully armed your executive team. But more than anything else, it depends on the integration and summation of the aspirations of the executive team and what they believe the organization can become. Visionary Marketers always enter into the first "inspire and aspire" work session with questions:

• What do we want to be famous for five years from now?
• What is the headline of the Fortune magazine cover story about our company going to say?
• When we are selling our brand, products, services, and individuals five years from now, what are we actually selling?
• How will our frame of reference change (from products to services or services to solutions, for example)?

These are great thought stimulators to get the organization to start to hear what others believe is the future potential and to start to anchor the executives in what a vision of the future could be.

Once some degree of alignment is reached around whom the organization serves, what it should stand for, and how it thinks it can win, a pragmatic discussion has to take place about the current realities of the business. The competencies, competitive advantages, weaknesses, and the like have to be taken into account. Once they are thoroughly debated and thought through, you can enter into a broader version of the growth-gap discussion. In this case, the dialogue should be about bridging or closing the gap between your aspirational future state and the current realities.

Step 4: Lay Out the Strategies to Bridge the Gap between Today and Tomorrow
At this point, you might want to turn to a few of the 12 growth topics. You might be getting hit with questions outside your traditional realm, such as operational continuous improvement, cross-functional integration and collaboration, information technology upgrades, and optimization of current assets. Nevertheless, even if the discussion is outside your normal range of expertise, you must be ready to engage in it at a C-suite level. In fact, only if you can become conversant across the entire range of strategic issues and across functions, geographies, businesses, products, and services will Marketing be able to sell itself as a strategic asset for the entire organization and a long-term partner for the CEO. Your ability to prioritize and balance specific growth initiatives and strategies outside your comfort zone, at the same time as you are handling traditional marketing responsibilities and toggle short- and long-term needs, will make this growth mind-set and organizational shift toward your place at the C-suite table a reality.

Step 5: Own the Imperatives
At first blush, this will seem highly administrative. Nevertheless, this step will keep you focused on The Shift over the long haul. Owning the list of strategic imperatives, along with the commensurate work plans, ownership, activities, milestones and metrics, and timing, while assisting each owner with his or her strategic imperative, will help the Visionary Marketer sustain a "shifted" position. The owners of the strategic initiatives will participate with the Visionary Marketer in an ongoing dialogue, built around quarterly updates, annual refreshes, and progress check-ins.

This excerpt of The Shift: The Transformation of Today's Marketers into Tomorrow's Growth Leaders is reprinted with permission from publisher Jossey-Bass. Author Scott Davis is a senior partner at global consultancy Prophet.