How to align a C-suite around one powerful brand purpose statement in under 90 minutes

A fast-growing business will need to regroup and realign at some stage — at the point where it moves from start-up to scale-up, perhaps, or when it needs to pivot as its market position shifts. At this point, refreshing and reviewing your positioning is not just a nice-to-have; it’s critical to commercial execution.

For scaling B2B brands moving from startup agility to enterprise-grade growth (such as scaling from £20M to £50M ARR), clear brand messaging acts as both an internal compass and a sharp market differentiator. As a B2B positioning consultant who helps leadership teams fast-track this process, I regularly facilitate high-stakes executive alignment sessions.

Recently, I led a 90-minute executive session for the Senior Leadership Team of a RegTech SaaS business — a global leader in regulatory intelligence — during a major strategic transition. Here is how I turned complex enterprise repositioning into a single, high-impact purpose statement.

The challenge: navigating the scale-up pivot

They were executing a fundamental shift: moving away from a legacy market perception of reactive compliance monitoring toward an enterprise risk decision engine.

Leadership needed a single purpose statement to act as a guiding light for their updated market positioning and scale-up transition.

The challenge? Bringing nine senior executives — spanning the CEO, Founder, CTO, Head of Strategy, and Head of Sales — into total alignment within a tight time window.

The methodology: 8 steps to executive purpose alignment

1. Pre-workshop strategy

Before stepping into the room I reviewed the varied statements they had worked up to date, analysed what they had rejected, absorbed a wonderful article by Conspiracy of Love (CoL), wrote some ‘candidate’ statements, and designed a structured session that would divide and conquer.

2. Track and fast-track

I had to fast-track some key elements: earning their trust, establishing that I understood their sector, and demonstrating that I knew where they had got to in the process. I tend to combine humour, eye contact and firmness here.

Now to re-ignite the collective energy of a senior leadership team that had already spent a few hours trying to pin this down. We had a lot to do, so I set up my stop clock facing me and stuck to the timings.

3. Define clear strategic guardrails

What makes an effective brand purpose statement? Before drafting a single word, I reminded them of the strategic criteria — the proven purpose frameworks, like those outlined by Conspiracy of Love:

• Brevity: must pass the “corridor test” — easy for any employee to recite from memory.

• Role + outcome: clearly pairs the brand’s active function with its real-world impact.

• The cultural filter: must explicitly signal the mindset shift needed for the next phase of growth.

They needed to tick as many elements as possible, so I popped this visual up on the wall.

4. Harvest core verbs and outcomes

Next: group work with silly names — Shrek, Fiona and Donkey. This was a great leveller, especially with new SLT members alongside the founder and the CEO. They needed one word for the ‘value’ the business brings and one for the ‘outcome’ it delivers. Rather than wrestling over full sentences, I broke the room into small cross-functional trios, combining technical leaders with commercial leads to erode functional silos. They had 20 minutes or so on this. We then shared the top 3 for our value and outcome, and other teams made notes of any they’d like to use in the next round.

I also said I wouldn’t stand for any corporate wank — words like enabling, amplifying and synergy. Anything from here on in needed to inspire and motivate; to be the reason staff would get out of bed in the morning.

5. The secret sauce: pre-written candidate statements

Then, in true Blue Peter fashion, I handed out 3 statements I’d penned. One had word play, another leaned into phrases that had been voted up in earlier sessions, and the other was super brief. Now to see if the teams could improve them. I secretly knew all 3 candidates were strong, so this section was designed to fast-track and lift the team — giving them something ‘nearly there’ they could polish with their expertise, rather than starting from scratch. Then I borrowed the kids’ novelty ink stamps so the team could upvote their favourite. Two votes each.

6. Refining the winner

We had a winner. Now, as one team, we needed the final refinement — arguing about key words and whether they needed more work. Often for internal work you can assume staff know what you’re talking about. Remove repetition, scrub out unneeded words, and borrow preferred ‘outcome’ phrases from the other candidate statements.

7. Stress test

Now we had our statement — did it tick all the boxes? Could we apply the “scale-up filter test”: does this statement turn away legacy passivity? Does it align with our enterprise buyer’s board-level goals? Can we cross off the CoL framework criteria? Does it avoid corporate language? If the answer to all that is yes, I spring a quick ‘close your eyes’ and pick on someone in the room to recite what we’ve just fashioned. If it’s brief, sharp and memorable, that person — whoever it is — should be able to recall the winning candidate.

8. Sneaking doubt

It’s important to point out that some might look at the output in the morning and question its virility. Leaders should remind themselves of the process we’ve just been through: 90 minutes from the SLT — 9 × 90 minutes — that’s nearly 14 hours of executive labour. Plus a facilitator who knows what she’s doing. By paring generic corporate phrases down into sharp, memorable wordplay, leadership teams move past passive consensus and reach true strategic clarity.

Why getting your positioning right matters

Slogging away at marketing without a clear position is a waste of steam. Your sales conversations end up going around in circles, and your core message leaks out until nobody is quite sure what you actually stand for. When leadership, sales, and product tell one unified story, every conversation pulls in the same direction.

If your team is navigating a market shift or scaling past a revenue plateau, fixing your B2B messaging framework is the highest-leverage work you can do.

Ready to tighten your core DNA and make selling easy again? Learn more about The Brand Positioning Fix sprint.