Make Your B2B Brand Strategy Relevant to the Sales Team

You’ve analyzed your brand strengths and weaknesses, conducted research to understand your brand equity relative to key competitors, identified open market positions, developed your brand strategy, and set tactical marketing plans into motion.

But what have you done to help the sales team embrace and operationalize your brand strategy? Have you helped them understand how it will make them more successful? Put more bluntly, have you told them what’s in it for them?

As many B2B marketers can attest to, the sales team doesn’t always embrace the marketing team’s brand strategy. One barrier is a degree of mistrust between sales and marketing. But much of the resistance stems from differences in the two teams’ motivations and KPIs. Marketing has the responsibility—and luxury—to think in terms of long-term strategies. Sales must meet its numbers today. The inherent tension between these two sets of objectives can send sales and marketing down different paths, weakening both.

Improving alignment on brand strategy across sales and marketing benefits any B2B firm but is especially valuable for organizations that have modest marketing operations, but extensive sales teams. In practical terms the sales reps are often the primary channel for a company’s brand strategy.

One way to improve the alignment and encourage the sales team to take ownership of your brand strategy is to treat them as your customer and sell them on the strategy. Effective brand strategies are built on understanding the needs of the end-customers and articulating, and positioning why:

• Your solution meets their needs better than their current vendor;
• It’s worth the pain-and-suffering of switching to your product/service;
• And, how your solution will improve their desired business outcomes

As a B2B marketer, if you can address these same questions for your sales team about your brand strategy you gain a much higher chance that Sales acts on the strategy – they will buy it.

Answering these questions requires more than just presenting the brand strategy in a slimmed-down strategy deck. It requires understanding how the sales team operates, their pain points, etc. To do this we recommend conducting internal research with three levels of your company’s sales organization: Sales leadership, sales managers and frontline sales reps.

Sales Leadership: Your sales leadership sets the tone and broad strategies for the sales force. This includes the type of sales approach used (Challenger, Sandler, etc.) which sets the framework for how sales reps interact with customers and prospects – how they identify prospects, the questions they ask, how they present your product’s benefits, etc. It is also important to understand how your sales leaders view the market, competitors and your competitive differentiation. If your brand strategy varies too much from how sales leaders view the world, they will struggle to trust your recommendations.

Sales Managers: Your sales managers can help you understand the specifics of your company’s sales process: What’s presented in the first call, how much does the prospect usually know about your product/service, when is collateral provided, at what point are different stakeholders involved in the conversation, how much interaction do reps have with clients (literally number of calls, length of calls, number of emails), etc.

Frontline Sales Reps: If you want frontline sales reps to embrace the brand strategy you need to understand their needs, fears and challenges. Their income and job security depend on their ability to sell. Being human, this makes it hard for them to switch from an approach they feel is working, even if a new approach is better in theory.

Once you understand your sales team’s perspectives, processes, needs and challenges you will be in a better position to articulate how your brand strategy plays a role in every stage of the sales process from identifying the prospects mostly likely to buy to upselling customers. In addition, you will better understand how to incorporate the brand strategy into the sales process in a way that minimizes the amount of disruption to the sales team.

The outcomes of the process are typically shared with the sales team in multiple formats, including an overall strategic plan for the sales leadership that demonstrates how the brand strategy fits with their sales protocols and process, refinements to sales playbooks and training documents, and workshops and training sessions with sales managers and frontline reps. The more open and collaborative these sessions are, the more likely the sales reps are to embrace and own the brand strategy.

Isurus partners with onPurpose Growth to help B2B marketers work through this process and build the linkage between brand strategy and on the ground sales. While, we bring expertise, experience and resources to the process, B2B marketers can handle the process internally by following the steps outlined above and improve the chances that their sales function buys what marketing is selling.