Dear Friends:

I was recently invited to present at a client’s annual sales meeting to help their team learn the importance of branding and how to incorporate ‘brand selling’ into their sales efforts. As a result of this meeting, I realized how timely this subject would be for BETA readers and wanted to share what I’ve learned from this process.

Enjoy!

Peter

Brand Selling: How to get your employees on board with your brand

You’ve spent countless hours defining your company’s brand. Your tagline, product names, advertising and web copy are complete. Your offerings are differentiated and value propositions are defined. But is your staff on board with your brand? Do they know what the market should expect when they see or hear your company’s name? And are employees communicating it in every interaction with customers and partners outside of the company?

We know...a marketer’s job is never done. Considering the business climate, a tough competitive landscape, global interactions and especially today, social media tools that are rapidly extending your brand to wider online channels, it’s important to ensure employees know the company’s brand promise and how to consistently and accurately deliver it.

Understanding the Brand

While marketers can quickly recite the brand attributes of their organization, can everyone in the company communicate the certain qualities of the brand that make it unique? As a marketer, internally selling the brand is the first step to empowering employees to be brand ambassadors.

» A brand is not just your logo, tagline, web site and brochure…. it is a PROMISE to customers that a specific level of value, quality, and service will be received.

Some companies have learned this lesson the hard way. Eastern Airlines made a commitment to its customers that it would ‘earn its wings everyday’, but poor service quality – from food, to baggage handling to scheduling – led consumers to boycott and eventually the company went under.

This example illustrates the importance of teaching employees the promise of your brand. Also, communicate your corporate values and philosophy internally. A successful brand is one that is seen as an overall business strategy, and derives its success from full integration with all aspects of the business, including sales and marketing, internal & external communications, corporate philosophy and product development.

Getting Your Ambassadors On Board

Here are 5 easy steps to get your brand ambassadors started:

Know what you’re working with
To start, get a baseline understanding on how much your employees already know about the brand. Survey every department with 3-5 questions about the brand. Find out how many employees can accurately recall the company’s tagline? What do they think is the essence of the company’s brand? Do they know if it is in line with what customers think? What do they think they can do to support the brand?

Provide training and awareness programs
Create a "brand culture" where the organizing principle for all activity centers on delivering the brand promise to customers. To help employees remain aware of your brand priorities, use every opportunity to communicate your brand, including:

• Staff and departmental meetings
• New employee orientation materials and training classes
• Employee briefings prior to trade shows and conferences
• Internal communications
• Annual company meetings
• Employee performance reviews
• Marketing agency-led sessions to review your company's advertising and communications program

With the growth of social media, it’s critical to provide employees with guidelines to connect directly with customers to more actively engage in brand selling. This applies to employee blogs, LinkedIn or Facebook profiles, and Twitter accounts.

• Encourage employees to think about the consequences of their communications: Using a blog to trash or embarrass the company, customers, or co-workers, is not only dangerous but ill-advised
• Remind them that it’s perfectly fine to talk about your work and have a dialog with the community, but it’s not okay to publish confidential information
• Have an easy and convenient process in place for employees to get marketing or management’s sign-off before they publish content online

Protect brand identity
Automate brand identity delivery with easy-to-use templates and logos including email signatures, style guides, pre-branded PowerPoint presentations, etc. It’s a very simple first step for ensuring the visual elements of the brand are consistent across the board.

Arm the front lines
Here are some pointers for sales and customer service representatives interacting with customers the most:

• Use branding as a foundational sales tool and sell it first
• Put the brand into your sales language in order to leverage the brand's strength in the marketplace
• Wrap the brand experience within each step and at every level of the sales process
• Hold occasional "brand refresher" meetings with customers to reinforce the long-term benefits of partnering with your company and encourage sales folks to share feedback they are getting from customers
• With sales in particular, take the time to resolve customer issues in person, as personal attention and face-time breed familiarity, extend contacts across management, and uncover new opportunities

Build a philosophy
Encourage employees to incorporate the brand into their every day processes. From email to phone and in-person conversations, employees should ask themselves, what can I do to best present myself in a way that aligns with the company’s brand? Every communication should be viewed as an opportunity to assert brand image and drive brand loyalty.

• Create a simple at-a-glance branding and key message document that employees can easily access and keep top of mind as they perform their daily job functions
• Create scheduled assessment periods to get continuously updated internal and external readings on brand delivery and its effectiveness with employees and customers
• Encourage employees to see every communication as an opportunity to assert brand image and drive brand loyalty
• Keep language basic and always relate it directly to a particular department

For marketers, building a brand can take months, even years. But in today’s digital world, a brand can be damaged in a ‘Twitter minute.’ Companies that live and breathe the brand promise, put training and development programs in place, along with metrics and performance management systems to promote ‘good brand behavior’, will be successful in integrating its brand strategies through the company at every point of public contact.

Client Corner

LeadLife’s Lisa Cramer Says “Show Me the ROI”
on Marketing Campaigns

Published in June 2009 Sales & Marketing Management

Show Me the ROI
By Lisa Cramer

Let's say your manager wants you to evaluate your current marketing campaigns in order to determine which are generating the most leads which are converting into the most "sales ready" leads, and of course, which are delivering the highest ROI. Do you know where to start? While these are all common questions marketers are routinely faced with, arriving at accurate answers can be both difficult and time-consuming. Read more [PDF].

CEO Uses Twitter to Help Run His Company

In a recent article, Inc. Magazine reported on how Pingg CEO Lorien Gabel praises the social networking tool Twitter for helping him gain feedback about his company. According to the piece, the CEO at first thought Twitter was a fantastic waste of time. And, instead of becoming a Twitter user who posts updates to attract followers, he tapped the monitoring and market research power of Twitter by actively watching and responding to key search terms relevant to his company. Thanks to the Twitter application TweetDeck, he also uses it to effectively connect with influencers, address customer praises and complaints, and respond to real-time competitive intelligence. To learn more about how you can tap the power of Twitter for your company, read the full story online here.

Client Buzz

OmniVue Named 2009 East Region
Microsoft Dynamics Partner of the Year

OmniVue, the East’s leader in delivering flexible accounting, financial and customer management solutions for informed decisions, was recently named the East Region 2009 Microsoft Dynamics Partner of the Year. The award was presented to OmniVue in recognition of exceptional service and sales performance. OmniVue was also honored with induction into the 2009 Microsoft Dynamics Inner Circle and 2009 Microsoft Dynamics President’s Club.

Equifax and Digital Element Partner

Digital Element, the leading provider of IP Intelligence technology, has partnered with Equifax Inc. to pilot a new solution that delivers the industry’s most comprehensive financial, demographic, lifestyle and purchase data in real-time to online environments. The solution, Consumer Insight Engine, leverages Equifax’s deep data assets with Digital Element’s technology to help businesses better target online content and enhance consumers’ online experience. From retailers to advertising networks to publishers, businesses can use this new solution to bring an unprecedented array of customer insights to bear on a wide range of online interactions.

SITS & Celebrity Event

Soccer in the Streets, a nonprofit organization committed to teaching positive choices through soccer, is “having a ball without a gala” to celebrate its 20th anniversary on Sunday, October 4th from 3 – 6 p.m. The event, to be held at Piedmont Park and Park Tavern in Atlanta, Ga., includes a “Black Tie Soccer Game”, BBQ buffet dinner, auctions, raffles and games. Tickets are $50 for adults and $15 for children 12 and under. All proceeds will benefit the Soccer in the Streets program. To register or to make a donation, please click here.

New Clients

North Highland is a global, employee-owned management and technology consulting company that delivers strategic and tactical business solutions to Fortune 1000 clients, government agencies and non-profits. Along with Highland Worldwide, its international company, North Highland has over 40 offices in the U.S., Asia, Europe and Australia. Carabiner’s public relations campaign for North Highland includes strategic messaging and content creation, analyst and media relations and speaker placements at prominent industry events.

Steelbox, a former client of Carabiner Communications and now a division of Adtech Global Solutions (AGS), has picked Carabiner as its PR agency of record. The company develops hardware appliances for large-scale media switching, distribution and management of IP video files. With applications in surveillance, online gaming, medical imaging and broadcasting, the technology manages up to 10 times the bandwidth that alternative approaches can handle. We’re thrilled to be working with Steelbox again and look forward to another great partnership!

New Services

SEO for PR

Need help creating messages that will resonate with online audiences while increasing website traffic, improving search engine rankings, and ultimately improving sales and marketing? Contact us at info@carabinerpr.com to learn about our new service.

Boost Online Marketing with Web Videos

Watch our newest video for ideas!

Carabiner Spotlights

Leslie Tentler: Business Writer by Day,
Award-Winning Fiction Writer by Night

Leslie Tentler, Carabiner’s Editorial Director, is not just an expert at writing corporate messaging for technology companies. She’s also an award-winning fiction writer who recently signed with a NYC literary firm.

During her career, Leslie has written materials for startups as well as large companies like Apple, Ericsson GE, IBM, Lotus Development Corp., Dun & Bradstreet Software and The Weather Channel. In addition to her significant high-tech writing experience, she has also worked in healthcare and nonprofit marketing, including writing projects for Cape Cod Healthcare, The Mayo Clinic and Palomar Pomerado Health of San Diego. Her healthcare work includes a creative television PSA promoting awareness of heart attack symptoms and the importance of “dialing 911” for early diagnosis and treatment – a spot that ran in multiple U.S. states.

In her “spare time,” Leslie also writes romantic suspense fiction, and has received multiple awards for her unpublished works, including Georgia Romance Writers’ prestigious “Maggie” award for single title contemporary fiction, and the Denver Romance Writers “Molly” award for romantic suspense.

Leslie resides in Lawrenceville, Ga., with her husband, Bob, and a white standard poodle named Tori. A native of Kingsport, Tenn., she graduated summa cum laude from East Tennessee State University with a degree in mass communications.

Congratulations Leslie!