Ensuring Your Sales Approach and Messages are On-Brand

Salespeople can easily adopt the attitude that their job is to "sell" and everyone else in the organization has the responsibility to ensure the brand is delivered. These four exercises can be used with a sales force to heighten their awareness about their role in delivering the brand promise while selling the brand.

CLUTTER REMOVAL

Examine everything your salespeople do for customers. Eliminate activities that are not necessary or not directly related to selling your brand promise or brand value to customers. This will, no doubt, require elimination of certain administrative tasks.

If you have an automated telephone system, do you make your customers identify themselves by their ID numbers and then ask for the same information again when they are connected to a live person? If so, eliminate that "clutter." How many times do you make customers sign your forms? Is that necessary for legal purposes? If not, eliminate that clutter.

Spend time with salespeople observing how their activities enhance your brand. Many times salespeople get confused as to what they are doing with customers. They don't frame their sales interactions to underscore the brand. Help them pare down their selling activities so your brand values create brand-reinforcing customer interactions. Keep them focused with clutter removal.

DEMAND CONSISTENCY

Identify which of your sales staff currently sell your brand values along with selling products or services. Set up step-by-step checklists of your already-successful sales staff so that your entire sales force can more easily emphasize all the essential points that relate to brand value.

We do not recommend scripting staff. We also appreciate that every salesperson has a slightly different style when he or she sells. However, some elements of your brand value should be influencing everyone's sales process.

Ask your salespeople to represent your brand's essential features—every time they sell! For example, if you deliver a product that is highly customized and this customization is one of your major brand propositions, sales messages about that customization should probably be presented within the first few minutes of any sales conversation.

SELL THE WAY YOUR CUSTOMERS LIKE TO BUY

Study your customers to find out how they like to buy your brand. What values are reinforced in the way they purchase your product so they are, in effect, purchasing your brand in the process of buying your products or services?

Most organizations know how they want their products to be sold without taking into consideration how the customer likes to buy. Tele-marketers are renowned for this. For example, when we tell telemarketers that we are not interested in their products or services, they frequently still ask us to write down a toll-free number—in case we change our minds! All this does is increase irritation levels and reflect badly on the brand.

The purpose of branding is to reinforce the ideas that are meaningful to your customers even during the sales experience. Here are several questions to ask about customers to help you get started:

• Are there any parts of your brand that are not demonstrated in the sales process?

• Are your customers quick to make their decisions while buying from you? Or do they like a leisurely sell or some combination of both? How can you tell which customers want which selling style?

• What previous experience have customers had with you that you definitely do not want reinforced?

• What is of value (for example, education about your brand and products) to the customer in your sales process? How do these value points link to your brand promise? ^[7]

SELL YOUR BRAND

Make sure that your entire sales force knows how to sell your brand, without selling a service or product. In other words, if you were to sell the value of your brand idea, how would that be done?

Have one group of salespeople demonstrate selling just your brand. Have another group demonstrate selling your competitor's brand.

Learning how to focus on just your brand idea teaches salespeople to cut to the quick in terms of your brand values and proposition.

To do this, they will probably need to know your major brand stories. Some of them are legendary in companies; they are a treasure, and everyone who sells the company should know how to tell them in an exciting, engaging manner.

^[7]B. Bachrach, "How to Influence Human Behavior," Executive Excellence, 12 (1995): 12–13.