Clear Review - a case study in Visioneering

My journey with Visioneering started back in 2016 with my experience of founding and scaling Clear Review, a software platform in the employee performance management and engagement space.

For decades, employee performance management had centred around annual objectives and annual appraisals, a process that was typically dreaded by employees and managers alike, and which I felt added no value to organisations. I wanted to change that, so I designed Clear Review to replace annual appraisals with agile goals, feedback given in real-time, and regular ‘check-ins’ between managers and employees.

When we launched, we followed the typical software marketing playbook of explaining why our software was better than the competition. We wrote eBooks on why annual appraisals didn’t work and focused on why our features offered a better alternative. This enabled us to pick up a number of ‘early adopter’ clients who were fed up of the status quo and were willing to take risks. But we weren’t winning customers in the numbers we needed to scale profitably. We were attracting interest, but not converting.

Something needed to change.

A colleague introduced me to Simon Sinek’s excellent book ‘Start with Why’. It made me realise that we were focusing too much on ‘What’ - our software features - and not enough on ‘Why’. So we focused our marketing and sales efforts around research on the impact of our process of ‘continuous performance management’ on things like productivity and employee engagement. Our growth rate ticked up accordingly, but not to the exponential levels that we really wanted.

Then I met up with branding, storytelling and comms guru, Glenn Mason (now my Co-Director at The Visioneers) and he helped me to understand the power of putting vision at the front and centre of the business - and making it exciting and inspiring. So we did, and everything changed.

From sales meetings to recruitment ads, from event stands to employee onboarding, we led with our vision of work:

“Imagine a workplace where every employee is clear on their priorities, is motivated and supported to progress, and their achievements are recognised. That’s what Clear Review does”.

We no longer had to compete on software features. Instead, we found that customers wanted to be part of our movement to change the world of work for the better. Our growth became exponential. We attracted the best talent without having to pay top dollar. And our staff turnover was pretty much zero.

We soon caught the attention of investors and bigger software companies who were equally excited about our vision and its potential, and it wasn’t long before we were aquired at a premium valuation.

That’s the power of leading with vision. A process we call Visioneering®. To find out how Visioneering could benefit your organisation, why not try our Free Vision Impact Assessment.