Sales Archives - Emotive Brand

Navigating the New Norm: Fast Forward for Efficient Growth and Strategic Stability

Posted on April 26, 2021 by Tracy Lloyd

We work and compete in a fast-moving world, driven by an accelerating pace of technological and social change. The markets we compete in shift quickly, competition intensifies, and expectations rise. Flux is the new normal. This increases the pressure to enhance efficiency, sharpen competitiveness, and improve profitability—all at the speed your business demands.

As a brand strategy firm, we understand that many of our clients, especially those operating in crowded, in-flux categories, need a much more agile approach to address the changing dynamics reshaping their markets and business. To meet these needs, we developed Fast Forward. Fast Forward is a six-week process that focuses on the challenges your brand, team, and business face, prioritizes them, and gives you the tools to address them.

Fast Forward is an agile set of strategy development frameworks, tools, and practices designed to empower learning, gain superior return on capital, and accelerate implementation. It’s a more flexible process for overcoming the barriers to successful, timely activation of strategy. Fast Forward does exactly what its name suggests: moves your business forward, and moves it fast.

Your Fast Forward engagement is completely customized to your situation. The deliverables are defined by the challenges and opportunities you face and the strategic outputs you prioritize as most important. The speed and power of Fast Forward stems from its format and focus. Below is an outline of what we tackle each week to gain momentum and drive impact.

Weeks 1-2: Immersion and Audit
We embark on a comprehensive week of intelligence gathering and analysis. We dive deep into your brand, business, and industry, fully immersing ourselves to gain insights and understanding.

We’ll assess your current positioning to distinguish your brand from key competitors, interview stakeholders to gain a deeper understanding of what is and isn’t working, identify white space opportunities for you to own in market, evaluate your latest brand and product messaging, and present a comprehensive audit of our discoveries.

Week 3: Workshop
Based on our findings from the immersion and audit, we develop, explore, and workshop new ideas to enhance your positioning and messaging, ensuring alignment with internal teams.

Weeks 4-6: Develop, Refine, and Deliver
During the final phase of Fast Forward, we focus on producing your bespoke deliverables that will provide the highest possible value and impact on your organization. Below are just a few examples of deliverables you can choose from after we’ve aligned on the key challenges you are facing:

Implement your augmented positioning and messaging through website landing pages that stand out and move the needle
Refresh your sales deck to amplify the impact of your elevated story
Craft a narrative to align and empower cross-functional teams with a unifying vision and strategy to harmonize your efforts

At the end of the six-week engagement, your team will hit the ground running with renewed strategic clarity and the agreed upon market-ready strategic elements to achieve the transformations essential to creating durable value and returns.

The interior of the diagram represents the iterative process of our Fast Forward offering.

The goal of Fast Forward goes beyond just solving problems; it identifies new strengths with the potential to accelerate your performance by generating new levels of coherence and coordination among your activities, resources, and people. All too often we’ve seen that the 30,000-foot views of strategy do not succeed without successful on-the-ground execution. Such execution requires the commitment and belief of leaders and implementers.

Fast Forward involves your team throughout the process to ensure alignment and gives you a new cohesive approach to strategy and implementation. Is it time to Fast Forward your business? Are you looking to make an immediate impact?

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and creative agency that unlocks the power of emotion to propel brands, cultures, and businesses forward. We are a remote-first agency with a footprint in the San Francisco Bay Area.

A 5-Step Action Plan for Sales and Marketing Alignment

Posted on March 19, 2019 by Stephen Banbury

B2B Sales and Marketing Alignment 2.0

A former colleague of mine just started a job where she was required to stand up and deliver a sales presentation to the sales leadership team. That wouldn’t be unusual for a new salesperson – but she’s a marketer. And the experience of walking in the sales team’s shoes made her a better one.

B2B companies talk a lot about sales and marketing alignment, but talk will only get you so far. Companies need to take action to get their sales and marketing teams empathizing with each other, strategizing together, and working from the same playbook.

It’s a critical time for sales and marketing alignment. The benefits have never been greater. As technology and data transform business, new opportunities are emerging every day for the savviest B2B companies to boost lead quality, close more deals, strengthen their brands and improve their work culture through tighter teamwork.

So how to get from here from there? If you take the following action steps, you’re all but certain to enjoy stronger B2B revenue growth this year.

Action 1: Plan together

Most companies have already conducted their 2019 planning meetings, but if you haven’t, now is the time. And even if you have, you shouldn’t stop there. Before the holidays, be sure to put four quarterly sales and marketing planning meetings on your calendar for next year.

A lot of change can happen over the course of a year, so it’s important to have an in-depth planning session at least quarterly. This is a chance for B2B sales and marketing teams to sit together and review sales objectives for each time period. Then you can agree on how the strategic marketing plan can best support those objectives, from corporate and field events to high-value content.

Action 2: Walk in their shoes

Aligning goals and tactics is an important start, but for greater impact, marketing needs to truly understand the hurdles salespeople face every day.

Marketing tends sometimes to lean toward the aspirational, but sales enablement requires a more down-to-earth approach. It’s important that marketers attend regular sales team meetings – yes, every week — and hear firsthand what is working, what is not, what prospective customers truly care about, and what key questions marketing absolutely needs to answer.

As my friend’s experience above illustrates, having B2B marketers stand and deliver a sales presentation is a great way to enhance their understanding of how well their own slides work in practice, not just in theory. Actually telling the story is the best way to gauge how each piece connects with different audiences while identifying any gaps.

Sales, for its part, should appreciate that marketing is tasked with a longer-term, strategic role in growing the company, the brand, and its customer relationships.

Particularly as subscription-based SAAS becomes the dominant revenue model, topline growth is driven less by closing a few big deals and more by long-term nurturing that paves the way for customer loyalty and successful cross-selling and up-selling.

It takes mutual respect flowing both ways to fully leverage the strengths of both sales and marketing – so everyone can reap the benefits of these opportunities.

Action 3: Connect top to bottom

Sales and marketing alignment at the executive level is not enough. The entire organization, from the c-suite to operations to customer-facing field staff, should know each other and have regular conversations. If this isn’t happening, now is a good time to make those introductions.

Action 4: Pay for what you get

Typically sales teams are compensated based on meeting and exceeding revenue targets, while marketers aren’t – but it doesn’t have to be that way. Some B2B companies have started rewarding marketers for KPIs like deals influenced or deals sourced. Good CRM tools are making it possible to track the effectiveness of specific pieces of digital content, making detailed ROI measurement – and rewarding the content creators — more feasible.

Action 5: Lean heavily on your brand

As sales and marketing alignment gains steam, brand makes even more of a difference. It gives both sides a common understanding and shared language as they essentially co-create the B2B brand experience.

The most successful sales and marketing partnerships are aligned in their commitment from top to bottom – from their brand’s highest-level vision to its most tactical tools.

By nurturing mutual respect and leveraging the strengths of both the sales and marketing teams, your company will be set up for greater success in 2019 and beyond.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco Brand Strategy firm working with high-growth technology companies. Learn more about our work with high-growth technology companies here.

Sales: The Critical Element of a Growth Company’s Brand

Posted on October 25, 2018 by Sara Gaviser Leslie

Sales and Brand: A Connection Worthy of Discussion

Sales teams exist to grow revenue and keep customers happy. They’re also brand builders and the face of the brand to many customers.

They hear what customers want and keep a pulse on the market. When it’s easy for sales to share their observations with product development and marketing, their feedback spurs product improvements, brand definition, and growth. The first step in this process, though, is for sales to provide a clear explanation of the problem their product solves.

Recently we caught up with Pier Barattolo, a sales leader with decades of experience in technology companies, to learn how he makes sure the market understands what he’s selling and why they need it.

Interview with Pier Barattolo, CRO at Density.io

First, can you tell us a bit about your previous roles and your current gig?

My first quota carrying job was in 1996. My current job, Chief Revenue Officer at Density, is my third CRO position. Our sales team is small, handpicked, and focused on building the foundation for high growth and scale. As CRO, I am responsible for partnerships and business development and although I do not directly own marketing, I have a strong voice and influence on all marketing related activities.

When you join a company, you tend to be a founding member of the sales team. Tell us where you start.

Yes, I’m usually one of the first—if not the first—sales person at a company. I work very closely with the founder / CEO to establish product-market fit and put in the processes to scale the business. I start by thinking about the critical messages we need to develop and then what will get prospects to talk to us and, eventually, purchase. I ask myself, “Who should care about us?”

It’s about keeping things really simple. At a previous company, I didn’t take the time to really define our reason for being and this left the sales team to do their own thing and had to figure it out on their own. It did not work out very well for us. Now, I always work to identify and focus on the problem we solve and put it in simple terms so that everyone can articulate and explain it.

Messaging is, obviously, easier when the problem is familiar to people. But it isn’t always. Have you ever worked at a company that was in a new product category?

Category placement is really important. You have to be really clear which category you’re in so others can place you. It’s hard to sell something to a company that doesn’t have any budget allocated to that product/solution. I’ve found that when a category is particularly new, education is really important. This is often a big issue for platform companies.

So how do you create a platform brand?

You can’t depend on the enterprise to understand the power of the platform. It’s the selling company’s job is to educate the enterprise on the platform’s potential, the specific applications and how it solves a specific problem for a specific executive / buyer. Unless widely adopted, companies do not go out and look for platforms.

At my current company, Density, our technology allows enterprises to measure occupancy by counting people passing through a doorway. We position ourselves as an analytics platform, driven by occupancy data. On its own, that doesn’t mean much to most people! We need to define the platform and also give examples of the things the platform can do and the problems it solves.

So how do you do that? How do develop a value proposition for each customer?

You need to get clear on what you do, how you do it, and begin to develop the proof points as quickly as possible. At Density, we have a device we install above a door that measures people going in and out of a space. The problem we solve really depends on the customer. When we talked to our initial customers, we looked for underlying trends and recurring problems. We identified initial applications that were common and valuable to our target audience and focused on those “use cases”: security tailgating, office space wastage, facilities management, and conference room and cafeteria planning. We give executives the necessary data to enable them to make better decisions.

Let’s talk more about brand. You’re in a very early stage. Do you focus at this point on the brand?

Brand recognition and brand awareness help potential buyers understand who you are as a company. You’ve got to invest when you can. When I join a company, I first focus on the problem we are solving and then how we solve it in a way that is differentiated and valuable to customers. That might not be the flashy brand stuff people see but it makes a big impact on the sales cycle. The better you define the problem and the solution, the easier it is to sell and the stronger your brand becomes.

Speaking of sales, what’s your approach to scaling the sales team?

I tend to make sure that I have a strong foundation that can withstand high scale—but at the right time. It doesn’t make sense to scale before you have a clear and repeatable product-market fit and go-to-market strategy. Although our technology is applicable to every Fortune 1000 company we’re targeting companies that align best with the use cases we are focusing on today. Once we see a repeatable process, we will add reps and allow them to apply the recipe many times across many accounts.

How can the sales team impact brand building?

First, arm them with what they need. Content is king. We make sure sales has the content – data sheets, pitch decks, case studies – they need right away. The content doesn’t have to be perfect but they need something. We iterate on and refine this content over time.

Speaking of iterating, our reps are key to our ongoing learning process. They are out there hearing about how customers see our brand, how they use our solutions, and how we can make it better. You have to use every customer interaction to learn. Then you bring that feedback back inside and adjust. And then you go out again.

Any closing thoughts?

I’d just say that when you start to think about how your brand matters to people, it’s overwhelming. I really try to stay focused. If we can do everything, it’s hard to do anything. Take it step by step and get straight on fundamentals first.

Pier makes it sound easy. But finding product-market fit and defining your value isn’t always simple. If you’re struggling to articulate the problem you solve or develop the use cases that communicate your value proposition, we want to hear from you. Emotive Brand understands the connection between positioning and messaging and sales. Let’s talk about how we can help you make your product more relevant to your customers and drive revenue.

Emotive Brand is a B2B brand strategy and design agency.

Finally Create Marketing Materials Sales Actually Uses

Posted on August 7, 2018 by Sara Gaviser Leslie

Marketing Materials: Is Sales Using Them?

If you’re in marketing, you’ve probably created some awesome campaign assets only to find out that the sales team never used them. Or maybe you planned a customer event with a meaty agenda, but no one in Sales sent invites. You spend tons of time creating marketing materials and executing events and campaigns only to find Sales finds no value in them – and doesn’t share them.

So how do you create marketing materials Sales actually uses? You work with Sales as much as possible.

Know the Sales Strategy

First, you’ve got to bring Sales into the conversation. Ask them their top priorities so you know exactly how to best support them. Is their current focus in a specific industry, company size, or geography? Which products are they trying to emphasize? Decide together what accounts/markets you’ll focus on first. Wide adoption of account based marketing means you may already be coordinating on accounts. But when you understand the overall sales strategy, you can align your overall marketing efforts to what matters most.

Understand the Process

It’s not enough to understand the sales strategy. You need to understand the life of the sales rep. As a marketer, you’ve probably researched customer pain points. You maybe even developed persona maps to get to know specific customer segments. But how well do you understand Sales’ pain points? Put your persona mapping skills to work for them. Understand how they spend their day. Who do they communicate with the most? What material do they spend hours looking for in a response to a prospect’s request?

As you do this, you’ll learn about Sales’ pain points. It might be that they have no trouble getting a first meeting but they need more customer cases to close the sale. Or maybe customers ask for proof of ROI and Sales never has the latest numbers in the collateral they get from Marketing. When you know what your Sales team does to sell products that resolve customers’ pain points, you can help them do it faster, easier, and more frequently.

Make it Easy for Them

If you’ve created a persona map for your sales reps, one thing you probably found is that reps, even inside reps, are on their devices more than ever. Maybe the reason they never passed on your blog was they couldn’t easily share it from their device. Or maybe you aren’t publishing enough on LinkedIn, the place where they spend a lot of time. Make it easy for them to share your material. Take out all the admin steps so they can just focus on selling.

When you make it easy for Sales to use the materials you produce, you further your own goals. You help them adopt the brand voice, recruit them as brand ambassadors, and strengthen the brand.

Be a Service Provider

Ultimately, your work must drive sales. If you work in a vacuum, it won’t be long before you lose your job. Yes, it can be hard to prove your impact. But if Sales isn’t using your material because they don’t find it useful, the problem is yours.

Instead, think of Sales as your customer. This mindset shift can make all the difference.

How do you “sell more of your product” to them? What are they “buying” instead? You might learn that they find the Gartner Magic Quadrant report the most compelling info they can share. Instead of seeing them buying a “competitor’s” product, figure out what they find valuable in the Magic Quadrant report so you can serve their needs better with your in-house material.

Be There in the Last Mile

The last mile – the point where Sales attempts to close the deal – is often where things fall apart. Sales needs Marketing’s support. Again, if you’ve done a persona map for a sales rep, you’ll know that sales cycles can be long and painful. The better you know Sales, customers, and the strategy, the easier it will be for you to be the critical partner you need to be at this point.

Some marketers don’t include Sales in their work because they are afraid of losing control. That’s the wrong approach. The best Marketers partner with Sales and gain control over their work and help Sales do their best. When Sales and Marketing tightly align, good things happen. You get stronger brand awareness, better demand gen, and a shorter sales cycle. Invest in your relationship with Sales and watch your marketing efforts soar.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy and design agency.

Marketing Strategy That Fuels Growth

Posted on April 10, 2018 by Carol Emert

[et_pb_section bb_built=”1″][et_pb_row][et_pb_column type=”4_4″][et_pb_text]

More than ever, CMOs are being looked to as the primary growth drivers of their companies. But what if you seem to be doing everything right and growth is still falling short? You have a strong brand strategy in place, a good sales team, and your marketing strategy is being executed on time and on budget. What then?

Chances are good that, if you’re experiencing a disconnect like this, the problem lies in the connection between your brand and your target audience. You may be reaching them. But how successfully are you really connecting with them?

How can you identify the problem? And what can you do to nurture your target audience while giving your sales team the support they need to drive growth?

Marketing Strategy That Drives Growth

At Emotive Brand, we find that the diagnosis for this condition virtually always comes from the outside.

The area where insiders typically have the least insight is the hearts and minds of their target audiences, which are so easily obscured behind the company’s own view of where its value lies. Companies often also find it challenging to stay on top of new developments in communications when their core competencies lie elsewhere.

Cue your agency. It’s the agency’s job to:

Understand your brand, products, and services in a new and exciting way, through the eyes of the people who can make it grow.
Use customer, marketplace, brand, and contextual insights to define strategic shifts that will win them over.
Create the right message and present it creatively to get their attention and rekindle the connection.
Identify existing and emerging channels that will best support your message and resonate with your audiences.
Tie it all together in a marketing strategy that drives growth.

Rebooting Advertising and Marketing Strategy

We’ve been working with a Silicon Valley client whose technology is so smart it inspires us. This company has been in business 15 years. It has a crack product that’s unique in the market. The product should be selling itself.

But there’s a problem: the company has under-marketed both its brand and its product. Its sales are lackluster. We identified five primary marketing challenges:

Marketplace perceptions hadn’t kept up with the company, so potential customers had outdated ideas that needed to be overcome before they would even pay attention.
Its advertising and marketing communications were telling an old story that didn’t communicate the product differentiators and reinforced outdated perceptions.
Its communications style was out of date and disconnected from both the brand truths and its audiences.
The client was spending ad dollars against a broad target rather than an audience aligned to its sales target, wasting precious marketing dollars.

We dug into this project to understand the marketplace, the product, and the brand through the eyes of our client’s target audiences. And we transformed its marketing strategy with some fundamental shifts.

Aligning Marketing Strategy with Sales

First, we used creative and surprising ways to talk about the product in advertising. Solidly rooted in meaningful customer insights and up-to-date product truths, the creative is doing a great job at grabbing the attention of sales prospects. Fresh and resonant messaging and design are replacing apathy with interest and engagement.

We also employed account-based marketing (ABM), replacing the client’s broad advertising strategy with a personalized approach. We’re targeting the sales team’s hottest prospects, in the places where they are most likely to engage.

This more resonant, tailored messaging is reinvigorating the company’s sales as well as its brand, making it relevant again and helping nurture prospects who might have ignored a more general message.

If you need fresh ideas for connecting with your sales prospects instead of merely reaching them, Emotive Brand would like to connect with you.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy and design agency.

[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][/et_pb_section]

Branding Is the Heart of Demand Generation

Posted on August 17, 2017 by Chris Ames

Demand Generation for B2B Marketers

In the dark old days of 2012, the process of tracking a lead through a sales cycle was a slow, manual process. With the rise of automation platforms and integrated CRMs like Salesforce and HubSpot, our pipelines are now routinely filled with promising leads. The only problem? Everyone else has access to the same toolkit. What might have been considered a competitive advantage is now table stakes. Demand generation might fill the barrel with fish, but it’s the strength of a brand that hooks the lead.

Refresh Your Brand

According to Forrester Research, 68 percent of B2B marketers said refreshing a company’s brand was the most important step to take in 2017.

“If your prospective customer doesn’t know your company or solution – or worse, your company or product value proposition messaging doesn’t resonate with them – it doesn’t matter how savvy your demand strategy,” says Scott Vaughan, CMO of Integrate. “There’s a resurgence underway to refocus on brand and positioning, baking these necessities into the demand marketing effort.”

As the role of demand generation evolves alongside technology, how we utilize this information should evolve in tandem. It’s something that Vaughan calls “brand plus demand,” a layered approach that combines the strengths of a strong brand with the tools of great tech.

A Brand Is a Promise Delivered

Not all salespeople are religious, but every sale is an act of faith. The best way to build trust is with a purposeful brand promise. A brand promise is not a slogan or an advertising headline, it’s a natural extension of your mission, vision, and values. By establishing clear and consistent value messaging, potential customers can quickly determine if your solution is the right one for them.

Your brand promise provides more than just an appealing narrative – it can act as your company’s North Star for how you communicate, who you communicate with, and even the look and feel of your design. When it’s working right, your brand promise should filter and refine your demand.

Make Your Brand Experience Delightful

So, demand generation has led hundreds of new eyeballs to your brand. What do they see when they first land? More importantly, how do they feel? All that awareness and relevance will be wasted if your brand experience isn’t a positive one.

Thoughtful brand experiences and communications not only build trust – they win business. From your website design to your blog posts to the contents of your white papers, every experience is a chance to demonstrate a sense of authenticity and purpose. Make every inch of your brand work to create demand for your unique offering.

The Power of Personas

Typically, B2B decision makers are a team of buyers, not a single person. As such, the one-size-fits-all lead doesn’t work anymore. Create unique brand personas to discover what your audience needs, wants, and feels. What makes them anxious? What makes them feel fired-up? What’s the worst part of their day? Can you fix that?

As Paul Graham of Y Combinator says, “The hard part is not answering questions, but asking them. The hard part is seeing something new that users lack. The better you understand them, the better the odds of doing that.”

Brand + Demand = Success

So, maybe everyone’s pipeline is overflowing with leads. If you want to win business, you don’t necessarily have to say it first – you just have to say it best. Differentiate yourself with a compelling brand promise, go after your personas, and make every experience emotive.

“The reality is that sustained demand marketing success relies on brand strength and differentiations,” concludes Vaughan. “It’s not brand versus demand. Rather it’s brand with demand.”

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy and design agency.

The Value of a Sales-Led Brand Strategy For High-Growth Companies

Posted on August 1, 2016 by Paige Lansing Valle

A Sales Perspective

Tracy Lloyd, founding partner and Chief Strategy Officer of Emotive Brand, shares how her sales background informs her work today, and offers insights on the true value of bringing sales to the strategy table.

Tell us about your sales background.

I have an interesting background that has led me to the agency world, and on to brand strategy. Initially, I got my start in non-profit fundraising and development. A start-up CEO bought an expensive table from me to attend a gala event I was hosting. Throughout the sales process of getting that deal done, he said to me that I was in the wrong job, and thought I should be in sales … at his company. And so I did. And from there, I sold technology for many years—some emerging technologies, other enterprise solutions—in the states and living as an expat overseas.

How does your background shape your approach?

Everyone brings their past experiences and jobs with them. My background happens to be in sales. And I bring that knowledge into our approach at Emotive Brand.

Because I know how to sell and understand what it takes to be successful in sales, I focus a lot of my time there. It helps me back into brand strategy. With a sales mindset, I can reach a full understanding of how to position and sell technology to the enterprise. In fact, I’ve realized I can’t really brand something until I know how to sell it. I need to grasp what’s working and what’s not from the perspective of the sales team.

Since the sales team is closest to customers, they have a strong understanding of what customers need to buy. They are naturally driven to be successful. And they want everything at their disposal to be successful. They are the people I want to spend time with so I can witness first-hand what is going on. Understanding what will help them helps fuel our own team and our work. It is also a good reality check for me to balance what I hear from other parts of the organization directly for myself, and to witness the realities of what it is like for the sales team who is out on the front line.

Other people might come from different angles, but I think that this particular angle is something that is distinct to the way we work at Emotive Brand. I think it differentiates the way we approach strategy.

So sales teams are involved in your brand strategy process?

Yes. I like to involve them in a few, key places in our process. Early on, I like to go on sales calls and listen in whenever possible. It helps me get grounded in what’s going on. I listen to their pitch – how they address objections and how they position the technology. I pay attention to tone of voice. I look for signs that indicate that the customer understands. I want to know the exact point at which a no transforms to a yes, and then pinpoint why.

Later on, I like to involve sales when we begin work on prioritizing target audiences and then again when we are developing the value proposition(s) and messaging. At the end of the day, so many aspects of brand strategy have value by being vetted by sales – positioning, messaging, defining categories, and go-to-market strategies. I gather huge insights from the sales team – insights, I might not be able to get anywhere else. It’s my job to ladder back these findings and connect all the dots, and from there build the most impactful strategy possible.

It is obvious to work with the marketing team when developing a brand strategy. It’s not as obvious to work with the sales organization. But, for us, it works. Bringing sales to the table creates alignment, and breeds a better, stronger, smarter end product.

What kind of clients are your skills in sales of particular value to?

We work with a lot of high-growth startups that are going to market with products and services that are new, and often times inconceivable to most people today. They’ve built and engineered products that are ahead of the marketplace. This requires hard work from the brand in order to cut through the clutter. Our clients need help clearly articulating their true value to customers. Often times the market needs help understanding the brand’s value proposition and our clients need these tools to help their marketing and sales teams execute successfully. They need to quickly penetrate the market and sometimes even create a new market when one doesn’t exist. We have done our very best work for companies who have complex B2B technology, are beginning to sell into the enterprise, and who need to create new value for old thinking.

Where does brand strategy come in to play?

Brand strategy is about solving business problems. It’s as simple as that. All of our clients come to us with a business problem and we create a strategy to solve it. Most often the problems we are solving are about growth, differentiation, and creating a strong value proposition. Our clients almost always have a solid understanding of the features and benefits their product offers, but leading with that is not working. They may not know it at the time, but this is where the brand needs to step in and help them better tell their story.

For us, it always starts with defining why a brand matters at the highest level. We make it easier for a target audience to understand a technology and its role. From there, it’s all about creating the corporate narrative. Nailing the category, the positioning, and creating a strong value proposition and messaging to appeal to your top buying personas.

Brand strategy answers integral questions like: Why does your product matter? Why does it matter now? How is it different and better than what competitors are doing now? Sales teams need to understand the answers to these questions in order to be successful.

Knowing how to sell makes it easier for me to think about the end user buying our clients technology and how to best support a sales team with the tools they need to go to battle and more easily articulate this new way of doing business. We arm them with the tools that more easily helps them do what they do well — close deals.

Are there any challenges involved in bringing sales to the table?

Taking sales people out of the field is hard. So it’s important that we use them strategically and not waste their time. We don’t need everyone in sales involved in the process, but we make sure to include enough people so the strategy can benefit from their front-line experiences. They are very good at helping us gauge reality.

What’s the bottom-line payoff of bringing sales thinking to brand strategy?

There is so much exciting stuff going on in technology right now. For our clients’ customers, it’s hard to keep up to date and understand who’s going to bring the right value to their business. Brand strategy can help position a business to thrive – creating the right tools to go to market, and helping customers more clearly understand why a business matters and how it’s different. Using my sales background is a way for us to get to the heart of why the brand truly matters so we can create the right brand strategy.

This understanding helps create a value framework, situate the brand and its people for success, and ready a business to scale. Our work is about creating a brand that truly connects with people rationally and emotionally. A strategy doesn’t have real value unless it actually helps a brand reach the people who matter most to its business in meaningful ways.Bringing a sales mindset to the strategic table makes for a more impactful strategy. That’s the bottom line.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy agency.