The Salesforce: Why Does the Brand Stop There?
Why is it that the big brand idea so often fails to reach the salesforce? It’s puzzling and it’s something that I’m paying extra attention to in my work these days. If the proposition doesn’t help them sell, there must be something wrong with it. If it could help them sell and they’re not using it, then it either hasn’t been brought to life for them or they’re being rewarded for doing something else. Either way, it’s not a good situation, especially in business-to-business, where the salesforce is so important. Try an experiment. Ask someone in sales to describe you organization’s unique, persuasive difference. If it takes more than ten words, I’d be concerned.
The solution to the sales problem is going to depend on the cause of the disconnect. Often a new brand proposition asks sales to shift from a product focus to relationships with longer sales cycles, but they still get rewarded for selling products, fast. So that answer is clear: fix the compensation system. Sometimes it’s a communication and training problem which with some effort, can be dealt with. The stickier concern is when there is a fundamental gap between what sales knows about its customers and what the new positioning offers. This may be a case of trying to pitch a CEO level idea to a manager or it may be that the market has not been read right. I’d want to do some pinpoint work with one sales team and their customers to get at the gap. In my experience customers are very open to being consulted and like being included when you tell them you are working to improve what you do.
Having said all of this, sales is fundamentally a change-averse function and it may just be that there hasn’t been enough effort put into making the change work for them. I think we all forget that if you’re not involved in developing the story, it’s a lot harder to tell it.
