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Tag: B2B Brands

The Enterprise Growth Problem Nobody Blames on Brand

Posted on by Emotive Brand

Enterprise Growth Problem? Blame Brand (Really)

Has your positioning ever survived a happy hour?

The question is a reframe, inspired by a real conversation. A few years ago, a company with good positioning and real differentiation had just closed a difficult quarter. One of their sales reps was at a conference—late, at the bar, a couple drinks in with his guard down. Asked how he pitched the company to prospects, he shrugged. “Whatever I need to say to get the deal done.”

He wasn’t going rogue. He just never felt the positioning strongly enough to use it when it counted.

The Polite (But Perilous) Fiction

Most CMOs in enterprise B2B already know this happens. They just describe it differently. Adoption was uneven. Sales needs another enablement session.

What they’re actually describing is a coherence problem. And another training session won’t fix this.

In a 50-person startup, you can keep the story coherent through proximity. At enterprise scale, the brand has to survive across thousands of people who weren’t in that room, across functions with their own priorities and vocabularies.

Either coherence is strong enough that people carry it without being reminded, or the story quietly disintegrates into a hundred well-intentioned variations that add up to nothing the market can recognize, nevermind embrace.

That fragmentation doesn’t stay internal for long. When the market can’t find one consistent version of the company to recognize, it can’t fully believe it either—and belief is what gets a company valued and priced for what it’s actually built. Left unresolved, a coherence problem becomes a Belief Gap: the distance between the company you’ve built and the company the market is prepared to recognize, believe, and price.

The Nod That Means Nothing

There’s a moment worth dreading. Leadership team in a room, brand work on the wall, and everyone nods. But nodding is just the absence of objection, not the presence of belief. When people walk back to their desks after that meeting, the nod evaporates because they didn’t feel what they approved, they just confirmed it was accurate, and those are different things.

A CRO at an enterprise SaaS company put it well. “We don’t have a messaging problem. We have a conviction problem.” His team understood the talking points. They just didn’t believe them enough to feel confident improvising with them. And every enterprise sale eventually requires improvisation. The moment a prospect asks a question the messaging doc didn’t anticipate, you find out whether your team has conviction or just compliance.

Why Emotion Is the Rational Move

A Google and CEB study found that B2B buyers are driven more by emotional connection to brands than B2C consumers. That stops most people for a second, but it makes sense when you consider what’s actually at stake.

Emotion is the most rational response to high-stakes B2B decision-making. When a bad recommendation could cost you your standing with the board, you don’t just evaluate the product. You evaluate whether you trust the people behind it. And that trust comes from every conversation with the company feeling like it’s coming from the same place, which only happens when the people having those conversations believe the same thing.

The Pattern of Belief as Accelerant

Over 17 years and more than 200 B2B engagements, one thing has become clear. The companies where brand actually accelerates growth are the ones that treat belief with the same seriousness they bring to positioning.

When it works, you can show up anywhere around the globe—and every employee sells on brand, and builds product on brand. Not because they memorized the messaging framework, but because it captures what they believe really matters.

Customers feel the difference, evangelists show up on their own instead of being manufactured, and top talent arrives because the people inside are proud enough to recruit from their own networks. The company becomes something rarer than a unicorn: an enduring brand.

The Burning Question for B2B Enterprise

The fundamental question for most enterprise B2B companies isn’t whether their positioning is accurate. It’s whether their team could defend it to a skeptic without reaching for the deck.

If the answer is no, you don’t have a positioning problem. You have a conviction problem—just ask your sales rep at the bar.

B2B Tech and AI Brands Should Harness Emotion

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

B2B brands deserve the same level of effort as their B2C counterparts

We were talking with someone the other week about the role of emotion in brand, and they said, “Sounds great for consumer brands, but I can’t see it working for a B2B brand.” Well, we begged to differ! Indeed, we believe B2B brands have tremendous opportunities to differentiate by building emotion into the foundation of the brand.

The strongest B2B brands give people something to understand and something to feel. The key is to define the company’s Conviction—what it fundamentally believes—and the Emotional Impact that conviction should create.

Why Emotion Matters in B2B Branding

Strong B2B branding is about digging deep into a company’s products and services and finding emotional connections to the needs, beliefs, interests, and aspirations of people. (Don’t stop reading; this is the good stuff most B2B marketers overlook.)

It is about aiming for a meaningful outcome from your commercial endeavors and recognizing that when you touch people in meaningful ways, they pay you back.

Your employees work with greater purpose and get more satisfaction from their work. Your customers become more loyal, spend more money with your firm, and recommend your brand to their peers. Your supply and distribution chains become more responsive to your needs.

Building emotion into a B2B brand isn’t about creating “emotional” advertising that gets people all misty-eyed about your widgets.

Rather, it is about conveying the meaning and evoking the emotions that draw people closer to you and set you further apart from your competition.

And when B2B brands deliver in these ways, it is one of the most powerful ways to differentiate, grow revenue, hire top talent, and more easily deliver customer success stories.

Here are five additional reasons why B2B brands should actively pursue emotive branding:

1.  Business audiences wake up as humans. From the CFO to the data scientist to the salesperson to the receptionist, everyone in your business wakes up as a living, breathing member of the human race; a race as driven by the way they feel about things as anything else. By marrying your rational message to distinct meaning and feelings, you connect to people on a human level (and, as you well know, people like to be treated that way).

2.  B2B brands desperately need ways to differentiate themselves. Widgets easily blur into other widgets. It is increasingly difficult to differentiate on a product, feature, or service level as competitors find it easy to quickly duplicate innovation. So, where can B2B brands effectively differentiate? We think it’s by connecting to people on a higher level through meaning and feelings. It’s not as difficult as you think.

3.  Engaging employees is vital for B2B brands. In many B2B scenarios, it is the company’s own employees who develop, produce, market, and sell their offerings. Creating a sense of common purpose, motivating people to work effectively, and encouraging them to promote a spirit of collaboration are important cornerstones for any B2B enterprise. Emotive branding provides these cornerstones by creating a sense of purpose and direction in a humanizing and welcome way.

4.  B2B brands enjoy many deep brand moments. B2B customer meetings, a visit to the executive briefing center, and trade shows are deep brand moments that give B2B brands wonderful opportunities to convey their brand in new and differentiated ways and evoke positive feelings. Emotive branding offers interesting tools that help B2B professionals reconfigure, reshape, refine, and enhance these brand moments in often surprisingly subtle yet powerfully meaningful ways.

5.  There’s proof in the pudding. All of us at Emotive Brand have B2B experience (as well as B2C). We work with product-proven B2B technology and AI companies approaching moments when how the market sees them matters most—from strategic transformation and category shifts to enterprise expansion, fundraising, acquisitions, and exits.

For B2B companies, differentiation isn’t only about what the product does. It’s also about what the company believes, why that matters, and whether the market can feel the difference.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design firm for product-proven B2B technology and AI companies.

Is Revenue Hiding in Plain Sight? Six Steps to Refocusing on the Customer

Posted on by Stephen Banbury

Leading a B2B technology and/or AI organization is a lot like trying to change the wheels on a bike while you’re still riding it. Half of the time, you’re rethinking internal systems and how to assemble them in new ways. The other half, you’re just trying to keep the business running and avoid any major potholes. There are many different ways to drive an organization, but if you’re not thinking about customer experience at every touchpoint, it might be time for a tune-up.

Sales, Engineering, or Marketing?

If you’re a sales-led organization, you’re primarily focused on revenue, deals, price, and market share. You empower your sales team, invest in training, and drive a disciplined, well-executed process. At the end of the day, you want them to hit their quotas. This model can be very effective. The challenge is that each individual salesperson often creates their own tools to get the job done. This can result in an inconsistent brand experience, where every customer is getting a different version of the story. Moreover, a sales-over-everything culture can create burnout and impact your roadmap with one-off requirements that can’t be scaled across the customer base.

Hundreds of startups in Silicon Valley are engineering-led organizations, with a heavy focus on sophisticated software, data, and analytics. Code supersedes everything, and every possible process is optimized for iterating as fast as possible. When you move fast and break things, you can create something extraordinary. But you can also fall into the ideological trap of building just for the sake of it. It’s not that you can’t be successful, but you run the risk of creating feature functions that don’t satisfy an unmet, underserved customer need.

Marketing-led organizations are all about researching and identifying products or services that your customer needs and wants. In theory, it’s a fantastic model that is mutually beneficial to both the customer and the organization. Unfortunately, in practice, there can be some barriers to entry. Startups, for example, often don’t have the luxury of being marketing-led, as they need to allocate their resources to engineering and sales. Marketing is something they’ll invest in later when they are doubling down on growth. In addition, it can be trickier to get consensus in a marketing-led organization. Whereas sales and engineering have more objective metrics to fall back on, the success and execution of a marketing-led organization often hinges on whether it becomes an essential part of a company’s DNA.

Customer Experience Is the Best Teacher

While all of these paradigms have their pros and cons, if your organization isn’t focused on customer experience at every touchpoint, it doesn’t matter which function is leading because you’ll be severely limiting your growth. The era of asymmetrical communications—top-down or inside-out, where companies push out messages in one direction—just isn’t working anymore.

Customers are more informed, more dynamic, and have higher expectations than ever before. They are expecting a nuanced, two-way conversation.

Plus, the link between online reputation and business performance is staggering. A recent study of the hospitality industry by Cornell University found that for every one percent improvement in a hotel’s online reputation, its revenue per available room improves by 1.4 percent.

Companies need to be receptive and customer-centric if they want to thrive in this climate. This starts with an authentic focus on providing a superior customer experience backed by real conviction—a clear, authentic belief in why your business exists and where it’s going. Why? Because conviction is not only contagious—it sustains growth. According to New York Times bestselling author Simon Mainwaring, 91 percent of consumers would switch brands if a different one was purpose-driven and had similar price and quality.

The Spirit of Customer-Centricity

Now, you might think that marketing is the only place for such a customer-centric mentality, but that’s not the case. One of the biggest mistakes you could make is thinking that the customer only interfaces with a singular marketing message or website. They interact through the product, through sales, or by phoning client services or tweeting at a support channel. All of those touchpoints have to represent the company and brand in a meaningful way.

If you’re a VP of Engineering, chances are you don’t want your top brains spending a lot of face-time with a customer. You want them in front of the screen where they can put their talent to work. But that doesn’t mean you can’t take steps to instill a spirit of customer-centricity in their role.

For instance, product managers should be regularly analyzing the interactions of the customer with the product, as well as talking with customers directly, so they can turn those insights into requirements for engineers. It’s about getting the perfect balance of qualitative and quantitative inputs. If you don’t consistently remind your employees who they are building for, they can lose track of the “Why?”—that larger, aspirational goal of why you’re building products in the first place. Here are some tangible steps every organization can take to create a culture of customer-centricity.

Six Steps to Refocusing on the B2B Customer

  1. Don’t make assumptions about your customers. I’ve been in countless meetings where someone quickly whiteboards a customer journey—all without ever talking to a real customer. When NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton was tasked with reducing crime in New York, he didn’t just read reports—he rode the rails himself. Quantitative data will get you far, but you can’t really put yourself in the customer’s shoes without qualitative data. That’s how you truly get an outside-in perspective.
  2. With B2B, never forget the customer’s customer. When you’re working with a large enterprise, it’s easy to forget the effects your decisions will have on an individual. You must think all the way through the customer journey. Try to create meaningful outcomes at every step in the process.
  3. In the B2B marketplace, you should design with the same love and attention to detail as you would for consumer products. You may think, “I don’t care how it looks, it just needs to work,” but in an increasingly crowded marketplace, creating differentiation through a delightful customer experience is key.
  4. Never underestimate the power of authentic customer stories. They serve as great collateral for sales, marketing, and social media and remind those in your company who don’t get to interact directly with customers of the impact they are making. Currently, 71 percent of millennials report feeling not engaged at work. But if you’re able to create a situation where employees derive meaning from their work, everything changes. A recent Harvard Business Review study found that employees who derive meaning from their work report almost twice the job satisfaction and are three times more likely to stay with their organization to fuel business success.
  5. Consider your partners. Especially if you’re a B2B selling through a channel, you need to be cognizant of the needs of your partners, as well as your customers. How you show up to your customers is incredibly important, and that’s why you must always maintain brand integrity through each and every channel.
  6. Executive alignment is everything. When you get alignment at the highest level, it cascades throughout the whole company, ensuring that all functions are cohesive and on board.

Customer-Centric ≠ Customer-Led

You may have noticed that I have avoided the phrase customer-led. There’s a key difference between being customer-centric and customer-led. As Henry Ford said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Everything you do should be aimed at creating a fantastic customer experience. Nonetheless, you don’t want people-pleasing to get in the way of innovation. Customer feedback is incredibly important, but it can’t be the only data point. When that happens, it can lead to a dangerous feedback loop that creates tunnel vision. Trust your team, create an environment for risk-taking, and then go test the results.

At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter conceptually who is driving the company. What matters is that everyone deeply understands the pain points of the customers they serve. Everyone, regardless of role, should have a relationship with the customer.

As a leader, you need to facilitate an internal evolution where employees are not only passionate but can see the real-world results of their work. Belief is one of the most powerful tools in business. When people believe in what they are doing, they work harder, smarter, and with their whole hearts.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design firm for product-proven B2B technology and AI companies.

How to Launch a New Brand Category

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Launching A New Brand Category

The decision to join an existing category or to launch a new brand category is not an easy decision. Evaluating your product maturity, the product roadmap, and overall market maturity is critical. Once the decision is made, the strategy shifts to creating the right budget and plan to launch the new brand category. Building momentum is paramount to both the category’s success and, by proxy, your own brand’s position as the category leader.

As we’ve previously discussed, timing is critical for launch. You need to consider factors of competition, messaging, production, and market forces. And when the light is green, launching a new brand category with your brand as the de facto leader means getting buy-in, quickly. Building momentum for your new category, attracting important users and creating buzz necessitates its own strategy, one that has to be developed concurrently with defining and naming the new category.

Why New Brand Category Launches Fail

Just because you have a brilliant name doesn’t mean your category will be adopted. In fact, most fail. Lack of preparation, especially when it comes to budgeting, often results in categories that fizzle out. Businesses are often so focused on designing, manufacturing, and promoting their own product that they postpone the effort needed to market a newly developed category. And before they know it, it’s too late. The new category launch needs to lead your brand into the arena, not the other way around.

Common mistakes for launch include not creating enough context for the category, making claims about the category that fall short, failing to create enough distinction from competitive categories, missing the mark on customer education (people just don’t get it), or jumping the gun on timing. Creating a new brand category requires the same rigor as launching a new brand or new product.

Many of these failures have something in common: the company knows what it has created, but the market doesn’t yet see it the same way. That’s a version of what we call the Belief Gap—the distance between what you know to be true and what the market is prepared to recognize and believe. For a new category, closing that gap means giving people enough context, distinction, and repetition to understand why the category exists and where your company fits within it.

When developing your strategy for launching a new category, these five tactics are key. 

1. Be Consistent with Messaging
Just as you’ve developed and tested messaging around your brand, developing the messaging around your new brand category is equally important. Consistency is everything. In order to build traction, you’ll need competition, influencers, and customers to grab onto a clear and concise message. Everyone needs to be on the same page about what the category is, why it’s better than the alternative, and why it matters. It may be tempting to embellish the messaging with claims that make it sound remarkable, but don’t. You’ll need messaging that is repeatable, authentic, and true to your brand in order to be picked up by your audience. Test the category messaging, and assuming it’s working, stick to it.

2. Generate Competition
It may sound counterintuitive, but when you are creating a category, competition helps legitimize a market and increases the size of the pie. Your brand will actually benefit if others are spending their marketing dollars to help popularize the value of what you are doing. The key, however, is to be first to market (see #1: owning the messaging around the category)—and continue to find ways to elevate yourself above the crowd, while maintaining both a product and thought leadership position.

3. Tap Into Influential Early Adopters
The snowboard surpassed the snurfer as a category when Burton came onto the scene with a posse of well-known surfers and skaters who were early adopters of the new sport. They were not only the target audience for snowboarding. They had enough cultural clout to make snowboarding popular. When launching a new category, finding ambassadors with strong reputations will help raise awareness for and substantiate your category.

4. Popularize
Otherwise known as PR. Keep in mind that the category is the focus of the PR efforts, not your brand. Focus on cultivating buzz around the category in an authentic way. This requires some restraint on behalf of your brand. Drawing too much attention to your brand right out of the gate is a misstep. This is because people won’t yet have a way of talking about it. So create context first. Then, generate conversations around the category with a strong media presence (industry influencers, bloggers, press, and social media should all be activated). The buzz around your brand will follow.

5. Educate Customers
Host conferences and events—both in person and online—that use the category name. Educating customers about the category should be the central driver for marketing. Build your reputation without overselling yourself. Establishing industry user groups with digital meetups is a powerful way to spark conversations and create groundswell with a wide audience. With enough momentum, your brand’s leadership will be in position as a thought leader. And further embedding the category and subsequently your brand in customers’ minds.

The Rewards of a Strategic Category Launch

Identifying a new category and building it from scratch can serve as a powerful path to growth for your brand. And the effort involved pays off. Category creators experience fast growth and receive high valuations from investors. Category leadership is one of the clearest value-defining moments a company can create for itself—a point where the market’s understanding of who you are directly shapes how you’re valued. Creating a new category, your brand will be in a solid position to surpass the competition. Or break into a flooded market. On top of that, your brand will be positioned to own the category as the de facto leader. Category creation is nothing short of a game changer.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design firm for product-proven B2B technology and AI companies.

Do a Company’s Vision and Mission Statements Have Expiration Dates?

Posted on by Sara Gaviser Leslie

Vision and Mission

We probably don’t need to convince anyone that having a vision and mission matters. They give you a North Star, help you focus on a goal, and act as a check for your strategic decisions. But how long should a vision and mission stay intact? At what point should you change your mission and vision?

Like many brand strategy decisions, it depends. At Emotive Brand, we believe a company should update its mission when it doesn’t match its strategy. Few would argue with this point, right? What’s more difficult than deciding if you should change your mission, though, is how it should change. When we work with clients, we develop missions that are inspirational, aspirational, and can stand the test of time.

Let’s talk first about the definitions. A mission is a tangible goal that can be used to organize teams around products and services to meet the goal. A vision, in contrast, is a company’s destination and unifying principle.

We like to share NASA’s vision and mission with clients because they both map so well to these definitions:

NASA Vision: “To discover and expand knowledge for the benefit of humanity.”

NASA Mission: “Lead an innovative and sustainable program of exploration with commercial and international partners to enable human expansion across the solar system and bring new knowledge and opportunities back to Earth. Support growth of the Nation’s economy in space and aeronautics, increase understanding of the universe and our place in it, work with industry to improve America’s aerospace technologies, and advance American leadership.”

NASA had another mission previously—one we actually prefer to share for its simplicity: “To pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery, and aeronautics research.” So why the change? The latest mission statement was updated after the 2016 election. The new administration likely wanted to take ownership over the strategy and reflect the Trump Administration’s pro-business stance and an America-first agenda. The vision has evolved, too, but isn’t so far away from what NASA stated as its vision in 2004, “To improve life here, to extend life to there, to find life beyond,” and also similar to what NASA stated in 2014, “We reach for new heights and reveal the unknown for the benefit of humankind.”

While a vision, like NASA’s, usually remains stable for a long period of time, missions change more frequently.

How long can a mission last? Three years is likely too short a time, but 20 years may be too long to keep the same mission. Of course, when your mission no longer describes your business, isn’t believable, or doesn’t reflect the current management’s goals, you’re ready for something new. Changing a mission is acceptable and common. And as the NASA example shows, strong organizations change their missions all the time.

Ready to get started?

Here are some tips to make sure you aren’t revisiting your vision and mission exercise too soon:

Make it Aspirational

We recently worked with a company that wanted to move from a product focus to a solution focus. Even though the shift was still very much in progress, the company already knew the direction in which they were headed. Changing their mission allowed them to be more aspirational and communicate their new focus both internally and externally.

Give Yourself Some Runway

It’s a balancing act to pick a mission that can work for today and tomorrow without cutting off possibilities or narrowing your focus too much. A great mission flexes with the future. For instance, we developed a mission for one of our clients, a new company offering food allergy treatment. While the company eventually may offer its services to adults, today they focus on children. We made sure their mission statement didn’t tie them to a specific audience and kept the door open to a broader market.

Do More than Describe—Create Excitement

Your mission’s goal is as much about describing your company’s reason for being as it is about firing up your employees. Missions that are solely descriptive fall flat. You want to communicate the role you will have—be it the industry leader, the market’s convener, or the company creating the most sophisticated technology. When you put a stake in the ground, you create excitement externally and among your employees.

Keep it Simple

Your mission should always be on the minds of your employees and well-understood by the rest of the world. If it is too long or complicated, it’s hard to remember and support. (Read NASA’s current mission above again if you don’t believe us.) Simplicity isn’t easy. In the process of writing your mission, you’ll likely throw away many, many options but, trust us, it is worth it.

Vision and mission development is hard work. While it is an interesting process and can bring a company together, it requires significant investment. When you create your vision and mission with their utility and longevity in mind, you ensure you don’t repeat the process again too soon. And if you are looking for help, do let us know.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design firm for product-proven B2B technology and AI companies.

The Role of B2B Messaging and How to Get it Right

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Disruptive and transformational technologies

Technology is advancing like never before. With disruptive technology advancements in AI, machine learning, IoT, analytics, and so much more, it’s becoming more and more difficult for businesses to keep pace. Industries are being transformed and the world we live in is changing before our eyes. So how can you develop more compelling and differentiated B2B messaging for marketing and sales teams?

As a brand strategy and design firm, we work with many tech and AI clients who are in the midst of this change – racing the clock to get to market before the competition. And while many have worked tirelessly to build the best technology in their realm, they struggle with how to position and message their product or solution to their target audiences.

Messaging for disruptive and transformational technology is hard

Disruptive technologies require a different approach to messaging and positioning. Discussing features and benefits isn’t enough. In order to be truly disruptive, these companies need to change the perception of what is possible. Their messaging needs to articulate why potential customers should believe in their solution and how the technology will enable a different future. As such, B2B messaging needs to:

  • Articulate that there is a problem with the status quo of today
  • Ignite a shift in perception around why customers should believe in a transformational way of thinking
  • Position the product or solution in a way that both rationally and emotionally articulates the value proposition directly to key target audiences
  • Clearly show audiences how your offering can transform their way of doing business

These are challenges we often see our clients face as they struggle to integrate brand-level messages centered on the “why” into the broader messaging story. Instead, they lead with the “what” and “how.” When things are so complicated and are so transformational in nature, the messaging needs to be holistic in nature and incorporate the entire story—a story centered around the customer, not the technology itself. This departure from product takes courage.

Our role involves helping our clients make the complex simple. We find a way to unpack the technology and what it enables customers to do, and put it in more human terms. We make it easy for people to understand how the technology will help their business be more successful. Even the most innovative technology in the world will never see the light of day if people don’t understand how or why to buy it.

The role of B2B messaging in tech and AI

To be successful today, tech and AI companies have a lot to achieve: selling product, influencing prospects, inspiring investors, building categories, building market share, and driving revenue. Marketing teams are on the hook to deliver meaningful and differentiated messaging platforms to help support sales and ensure the brand presents a unique offering. This means B2B brands need a strong narrative and compelling messaging in place to cut through the noise.

In our work with our clients, we’ve seen first-hand how the role of messaging can drive change. Because of this experience, it has become more important than ever to get it right. There is a growing need to differentiate complicated technology products into easy-to-see “value” in the form of solutions that meet target audience needs.

Seems easy? Not so much. Much of our work is alongside CEOs who come from strong engineering backgrounds. They feel immense pride in the products they have worked so hard to engineer and develop. And naturally, they want messaging to lead with product. They see features and benefits as the only way forward.

However, we know this isn’t the only way. My background is in selling technology. I know first-hand what sales teams need to be successful, and I see the role of messaging as critical to the sales organization’s success. I have sold technology on three continents and bring this sales-led approach to every client engagement by adding a unique understanding of technology, how to position it, and how to create a brand narrative and messaging—messaging that addresses the big idea of why the technology matters while demonstrating how it solves a customer’s business problems.

That’s why, at Emotive Brand, we believe strong B2B messaging is about hitting the sweet spot between brand, sales, and marketing in a way that excites, resonates, and activates buyers.

Getting it right

Getting messaging right is a real challenge. Most often, messaging is an output of a larger brand strategy. As such, it has to crystallize what you do, why you’re better, and what you can do that no one else can. It’s not easy to articulate these values to your target audiences in both rational and emotional ways that activate them to do something.

It’s old news that a lot of B2B messaging—especially within the tech and AI world—sounds the same. But there is a larger problem at hand—a problem we’ve seen happening for a while now. A lot of messaging used by B2B companies isn’t aligned with what the customers or the businesses they are trying to reach really value. What companies are missing is the articulation of something more than features and benefits: true opportunity, values, and meaning.

Supporting marketing and sales

We’ve talked again and again about the role brand strategy plays in supporting and driving business strategy. So when the time comes in the brand strategy process to develop messaging, it needs to align and support two major functions within a company: Marketing and Sales.

It’s about driving two workflows within a company. Marketing needs B2B messaging to build out a go-to-market strategy and create sales enablement programs. Sales needs messaging to know how to talk to customers, position the product or solution, and close deals. If the messaging isn’t strong enough, marketing teams struggle to fill the funnel and convert leads. Sales has a hard time responding to RFPs and closing deals. In short, it’s detrimental to both teams’ success.

Smart B2B messaging can drive marketing and sales forward, positioning you to better reach and connect with the businesses who matter to your success. To do so, make it:

1. Customer-centric
A shift needs to happen from product-centric to customer-centric. This means increased focus on articulating the valuable, unique opportunities you can offer your target audiences. In the B2C world, it’s easy to focus on consumers.

The mistake a lot of B2B companies are making today is thinking that the businesses they are trying to reach are only making rational business decisions. And while B2B does require a high level of rationale, it’s important to remember that there’s also a lot of emotions at stake for B2B buyers. Many businesses today feel that they have an important role to play. They are mindful of cost, aware of how things are going to play together, and passionate about finding the right solutions to fit their business.

2. Research-led
In our client work, the tightest and most meaningful messaging we’ve developed for clients has involved some level of research—both quantitative and qualitative.

There’s a lot of value in talking to people one-on-one. It gives our team the ability, as a third party, to gain direct access to customers, prospects, and even lost deals to understand the audience’s needs first-hand. This level of empathy enables B2B messaging that can truly connect with people—with their rational needs on the right emotional dimensions. That’s why getting to the heart of their motivations, pain points, and needs is critical and can be the difference between thriving and failing.

3. Top-down
Like many strategic elements, messaging has to start at the top. This means the leadership teams must be involved. Moving messaging beyond features and benefits is a process, and key leaders have to buy into a more customer-centric approach or it will never be fully embraced. 

Once top execs are on board, they can work to align the sales and marketing teams at the highest level. This reinforces the messaging systems you’ve built by ensuring that people are talking about your business in ways that align with it across people and platforms.

When leadership, sales, and marketing are aligned around the same messaging, the company is far more likely to present a coherent version of itself wherever it shows up. That coherence matters because messaging rarely stays contained within one team or channel. It moves through sales conversations, campaigns, presentations, product language, and countless other interactions. The more consistently those expressions reinforce the same underlying idea, the easier it is for the market to understand and recognize the company for what it actually is.

The sales force is then equipped to utilize the B2B messaging in powerful, dynamic ways. They become more willing to provide feedback to marketing about what is and isn’t working. The collaboration between these two groups makes both the messaging stronger and the impact of the brand stronger. Driving ROI and sales.

B2B messaging as a driver of business

Messaging can drive brand awareness, equity, and buying decisions by bringing your value proposition to life for your key audiences. With strong B2B messaging in place, your business can then develop a powerful corporate narrative that brings all aspects of the business, brand, and vision together.

In B2B, messaging can be a vital solution in humanizing your brand and business. It can make it easier for your sales and marketing team to connect with your future clients in important ways that will fuel your business forward. The transition from solely rational to a blend of both emotional and rational can be a challenge. When you take the lead and embrace the process of identifying what really matters to your audiences beyond just the functional elements of your product, sales will take off, marketing will start to pay off, and your business will be positioned to stand out and thrive.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design firm for product-proven B2B technology and AI companies, based in San Francisco.