Buyer2Brand

Salespeople need to sell your brand

Branding is a marketing thing, right? I mean, what role could salespeople possibly play - especially in selling IT, where the sale is consultative and the purchase decision complex? So goes the prevailing wisdom.

With the coming of the Web 2.0 world, that tired argument has gone out the window. In consumer markets, branding experts talk of turning every employee into a "brand ambassador" - someone who actively promotes and "lives" the brand in every interaction with customers, partners and prospects. Forward-thinking tech vendors are realizing that the sales field (which owns the customer relationship in most cases) needs to play this vital role in building brand equity. Millions of dollars spent on direct mail and PR and keyword buys can't replace a warm body in this vital role.

CIO Today has written a comprehensive article on how to make each salesperson the living embodiment of your brand. A great brand is built by repeated actions. With every interaction, the sales rep provides the personality in front of all your branding efforts - good or bad. Actions speak louder than words, the article asserts, so every communication must be viewed as an opportunity to assert brand image and drive brand loyalty.

First, a vendor needs to understand its unique brand. Assuming that Marketing is doing its job in this regard (and in B2B tech that's a big assumption), sales support then needs to train the sales force to wrap the brand experience around the sales process that is already in place. This training shouldn't focus on the tactical - like enforcing sales presentation design templates. It's strategic sales training that seeks to institutionalize brand message consistency within each step and at every level of the consultative sales process. The key to Brand Selling is instantiating the vendor's core values, history, and operational procedures within the customer relationship itself.

Brand Selling is in fact one of the keys to selling higher inside a customer/prospect organization, the CIO Today article asserts (and I can't tell you how many of my clients over the years have had THAT as an objective!) Brand promises are no longer limited to the functional product/service level, therefore delivering on these promises forges a deeper emotional bond (yes, the "E" word) between vendor and customer based on trust and authenticity (i.e. what makes a great brand). The customer comes to view the vendor's unique mission and philosophy as not just empty words, but as directly helping them achieve return on their investment. To be sure, this strategic selling of "shared outcomes" gets the attention of CIOs.

A vendor salesforce that actually "lives" its differentiated brand personality with each and every customer interaction elevates its game. They infuse customer relationships with a deeper understanding of values shared. Some specific suggestions in the article include:

• Start by polling employees for examples of how your company delivers on its mission statement or unique selling proposition (if brand is unknown). Look for inconsistencies.
• Rewrite case studies and success stories to reinforce how your philosophy and values came to life for the customer's benefit.
• Hold occasional "brand refresher" meetings with customers to reinforce the long-term benefits of partnering with your company.
• Take the time to resolve customer issues in person, as personal attention and face-time breed familiarity, extend contacts across management, and uncover new opportunities.
• A sales force is the ultimate marketing research resource - integral to refreshing the brand and testing its premises - so a regular feedback loop to Marketing is imperative.

The results of stronger brand loyalty with customers is indeed quantifiable - as it sets the stage for successful up- and cross-selling over time.

Brand in a considered purchase

The insights stated here were gathered as a direct result of a number of primary interviews conducted over the past few months with fairly prominent VP-level technology marketers.

The conventional wisdom sadly holds that Branding is unimportant in the considered purchase world of enterprise IT. Branding has been labeled a "soft" science - because it measures customers' emotional responses to a company or its product. But impulses and aspirations play little part in the IT buying decision, it is argued, where the offer and the product are exceedingly complex. Branding's definition within IT marketing has been effectively marginalized to its tactical design deliverables - logo, tagline, website - or abandoned as a concern of B2C markets alone. "Why waste your time?" one VP advised me, "we're not selling Coca-Cola here."

I've been told by these same brand naysayers that winning customers in the technology market is about building rapport, impressing the right decision makers, being easy to work with, and proving ROI. Well aren't these all brand-building experiences for the customer? Don't the customer's perceptions linger long after the vendor representative has disappeared? The vendor's behavior in the market, not its positioning statements, creates equity over time - and that level of satisfaction is a measurement of the strength of the brand.

Closing those first customers in IT might have more to do with sound strategic selling than with brand, but keeping them loyal, building references, expanding your footprint within accounts, and extending to ancillary markets are all going to be easier with a strong brand behind you. Fierce brand loyalty is much harder than product functionality for competitors to break, copy, or steal.

Brand Happens. A B2B tech vendor's brand is formed and maintained in the marketplace with or without its active participation and influence. The customers control it, and they are already talking to each other. As B2B technology vendors, we’d better start joining the conversation. Current trends such as software commoditization, new SaaS/open source delivery models, Web 2.0, and financial compliance demand a new appreciation for brand-building in our industry. A conscious and enlightened effort toward building stronger B2B technology brand loyalty will directly translate into higher financial valuations for the emerging vendors that pay attention to this "soft science".

Ventana Research on customer satisfaction

Ventana Research is a fast-rising midsized analyst firm specializing in performance management.  In the rapidly consolidating world of industry analyst firms, it's encouraging to see Ventana's growth as an alternative to Gartner and Forrester's dominance.  It does a good job at covering CPM/BPM from the perspectives of IT, supply chain, finance, operations, contact center, BI/data warehousing, and sales/marketing.  A lot of its research notes and articles are still publicly available - also nice while it lasts.

Ventana's Contact Center practice released some startling findings recently on the state of customer satisfaction in our industry.  Of 100 organizations surveyed, 95 percent agreed that improving customer sat is among their company's strategic objectives, but less than 5 percent said they knew what it would take to do it.  This is indeed frightening in an industry that invests 6 times more to gain a new customer than to service a current one, and waits 7 years to turn a net profit from the relationship.

Ventana wonders whether this is a problem of culture, a failure of efficiency and effectiveness, broken business processes, or poor information management.

The firm concludes the last problem is the root cause, but I think it's cultural.  Even if most IT companies could attain the nirvana of "a single view of the customer", the industry would still suffer from an assembly-line approach to managing customers.  Customers are processed and passed off departmentally from Marketing (the lead) to Sales (the close) to Service (the project) to Support (the headache) in an approach that is TOO process-oriented and not PEOPLE-oriented.  Ventana calls out the industry's "structural inability to relate to customers" - where support staffs are left to recover the relationship (or ultimately kill it).

So how does this all relate to Brand?  Ventana explains that customer sat levels are determined by ALL of the customer's interactions with a vendor organization, and are damaged by broken promises.  These leave emotional responses like frustration and disillusionment.  If strong brands are promises kept and positive experiences delivered, then an institutional focus on brand-building would foster a culture where customer satisfaction was of paramount importance.

Talking about Brand is like talking about God

It has been said that talking about brand is like talking about God.  Everyone has their own definition and beliefs.  Still, I've taken on a new professional mission - to evangelize the power of brand to transform the way my industry sells enterprise technology and satisfies customers.

To understand the current perception of branding and its value for the B2B IT industry, I have undertaken an ongoing qualitative research study, interviewing some of the leading technology marketing minds on their branding dogma.  In this blog, we'll examine and discuss findings from this project.

Buyer2Brand will strive never to be preachy in its tone, but instead present the beliefs and opinions of minds greater than my own, relate insights on the news with links to point of origin, and analyze emerging trends and best practices as asserted by sources we trust in common.

If you are a senior-level technology marketer, and would like to be interviewed, please drop me a line.