Leveraging the Brand for Sales Activation

In today’s business-to-business marketing environment, traditional brand development processes are often too costly, lengthy, and superficial to make a meaningful business contribution. More importantly, "branding" tends to overlook the value and insights available within the clients’ organization–the people most intimate with customers and their requirements–the sales professional.

Our three operating principles:    

1.Sales-Based Brand Development
“Nobody knows the real world like the sales force”

More often than not, a distinct and unproductive gap exists between marketing efforts and sales requirements. This gap is a result of top-down branding efforts that ultimately do little for the sales force except get a prospect to take a call or agree to a meeting. Brand awareness is important, but void of the real-world connection to complex and lengthy sales processes, it will fall short of its potential contribution.

2. Just being different is not enough
“It’s better to be important than to be different”

Traditional positioning methods focus on how one offering is different from another. While being different provides some clarification and criteria for the selection process, it falls short in demonstrating just how your offering is going to contribute to the success of your prospect. Being more important defines the high value role your product and/service can play in your clients' lives. It’s not the difference, it’s the difference you can make.   

3. B2B is really P2P
“Businesses don’t buy from businesses, people buy from people”

Unlike the consumer space where transactions often occur as a result of broad-based brand awareness campaigns, complex business-to-business transactions require long and multi-touch engagements that take place between the sales lead and decision makers and/or influencers. It’s the one-on-one conversations that establish relationships, gain credibility, and allow for the coveted trust.

Where and how we can help.
Allen & Gerritsen’s B2B model is a particularly robust and actionable framework for complex B2B organizations and yields communications that are uniquely relevant, deeply engaging and highly effective at deepening customer bonds and growing sales.