We spend too much time arguing what shade of "red" is our brand vs actually executing (living) our brand. What a waste.
This is going to sound strange coming from a marketing leader, however, we in marketing spend far too much time focused on "branding." We spend countless hours picking the perfect shade of red. We sit through meeting after meeting to figure out the exact wording for our brand statements. And it's all a waste of time...if the rest of the company isn't actually living the brand.
Too many times all this branding work ends up plastered on walls or on dusty mission statements, ignored by the rank-and-file. The perfect color of red is meaningless if our front-line employees aren't actually embracing what the company professes to be. Here are two examples: one, how not to live your brand and another of a company truly living their brand.
How Not To Do It: Salesforce.com
Ah, Salesforce.com. A CRM that is as ubiquitous in the business world as bad coffee, conference callers who can't find the mute button while on speaker and painful corporate speak like "let's take this offline."
Our company's generic business phone number rings to my phone (lucky me). On the drive home the other night, a call comes in:
Caller: "Hi, this is 'Bob' (named changed to protect the guilty) from Salesforce.com. Is 'Jane' (one of our employees not in the sales/marketing department) available?"
Me: "She's out of the office. What's this in regards to?"
Caller: "I'm your Salesforce.com representative and I wanted to talk to 'Jane' about your renewal coming up!"
Me: "I'm in the marketing department and have been dealing with our CRM contracts the last four years. Do you not have that information in your CRM? Do you not have my direct line in your CRM? I'm pretty sure that within the last four years that information would have been captured."
Caller: "Uh, well, I'm new to your account...so...I don't, really...ummm, have that information in front of me."
Me: "Isn't that the point of having a CRM?"
Sigh.
How To Do It: DiscoverOrg
DiscoverOrg is a database + insights aggregator for prospecting and selling. We've been investigating the tool for awhile now...but recently decided to wait to purchase until we bring in a new sales resource.
I let the rep know of our decision and his first question was "what can I do to help?" I let the rep know we were having a tough time finding someone with technology sales background in the Kansas City area. And then our rep dropped this on me:
"What if I run a report for you with people within the Kansas City area, in a technical sales role and you can do some active outreach for either recruiting someone in or getting some referrals in?"
I said "yes!" And he delivered. He used the tool he's trying to sell me to both help me and show me the value of the tool. That's "living" your brand! You can bet when we're in a position to pull the trigger, DiscoverOrg is at the top of our consideration set.
How many millions of dollars do you think Salesforce.com has spent on "branding?" How many wasted hours on their mission statement? Yet their own reps aren't using the tool? Their own reps aren't showcasing the value of CRM?
A missing component in marketing is that we aren't "selling" our internal teams on the brand. If we can't get our own teams to buy into who we want to be as a company...how can we convince customers to believe it? We spend so much time, effort, energy and money trying to sell those on the outside on our brand-promise...but we often fail to spend more than a 30 minute meeting to review "brand guidelines" with our internal team who are ultimately responsible for living the brand. Perhaps it's time to flip the script and "market" to our internal teams, energize them, light a fire in them...and then turn them loose?
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