Because our customers are Marketers, I have insight into how other sales and marketing orgaizations work together. I continually run into Marketers that are blindly passing leads to sales without any feedback loops. I wonder if they really get it? If Sales and Marketing would just communicate with each other and agree to march to the same goals, everyone would win. If Marketers are compensated on the same goals as sales, they will be forced to communicate with sales.

When we sell role-based contact data to Marketers we try to educate them on the best way to use this data. It is not to just pass these leads to sales. The better answer is to use some form of direct marketing to warm up these leads for sales. Also, once passed to sales, the sales team should be able to pass leads that still need nurturing back to marketing. With feedback loops in place marketing and sales teams are able to march to the same goals.

Branding comes from the world of farming (I’m an ex farmer). Farmers brand their cattle for easy recognition. This is the same as in business. And here lies the difference.

For farmers, branding is about quality of beef, not about fancy gold-plated branding irons and impressive logos. In the world of commerce, for most businesses, branding is about fancy logos and catchy slogans. Using farmer’s language, most businesses focus on improving the branding iron at the expense of the quality of the beef.

So…

They buy the cheapest and crappiest feed for their cattle to keep costs down.

They hire the most expensive graphics designer to design their brand marks, and buy the most advanced gold-plated and platinum-handled branding iron to create brand awareness.

Then they hire the cheapest farmers (over-aggressive salespeople) to brand the cattle. Most cattle will die because the cheap farmers, instead of branding, will burn the beasts to death.

Then they hire the cheapest butcher in town who will botch up the slaughter and the cutting, and the farmer is forced to sell their beef at rockbottom price as discounted pet food.

But that’s all right because they still have the best brand in town… thanks to the fancy gold-plated, titanium-handled branding iron, which is extensively mentioned and praised in the farmer’s brochures and website.

And once we own the world’s best branding iron, then who cares about the quality of beef anyway?

So what brand is this? A brand to avoid. Because in spite of the rancher’s best effort, the market brands the beef as inedible rubbish.

But branding is not about perfecting the branding iron (e.g. logo), but perfecting the stuff the branding iron is used on, that is, the beef itself (a.k.a. quality of content, client service, innovative solutions, good marketing, etc.).

And in this effort, salespeople should be treated and paid the same way as anyone else in the company. It’s everyone’s job to make the company profitable and successful or else. I believe team works starts with the abolition of rewarding individual contribution. Nowadays it is teams that produce results.

Salespeople are just small links of the chain.

When a CEO gets caught shagging his secretary on the photocopier and the event ends up in the papers, that alone causes so much damage to the brand that no salesperson can remedy it by working harder.

I believe good branding happens when people get exposed to valuable content and great service, and in turn they build the company’s brand by talking about it. And that is a company-wide effort not merely a marketing ploy or PR stunt.