B2B Branding: Sales-Driven? You Should Invest in Brand for Sales Team Productivity
B2B Companies Should Invest in Branding
While I was working with Kodak’s Brand Partnerships team I experienced first hand the power of brand to enable sales team productivity.
Kodak spent decades carefully crafting and developing it’s brand - nurturing it, providing steady-handed stewardship and investing in it. When the company was reinventing itself after emerging from bankruptcy protection in 2013 one of the first places it turned to was the brand. The new CMO at the time, Steven Overman, knew that Kodak’s future success would lie in tapping into its heritage.
‘We had this amazing brand with a rich history, beautiful logo and iconic colours that got lost in the corporate machine. So we dug deep into the archives to inspire a refresh that was the best of Kodak’s iconic past and future. From a brand perspective it was a huge success.’
As a consultant working with Kodak’s Brand Partnerships team, which was responsible for selling the brand to prospective partners, I would discover that this heritage had tangible value in the present. No matter where my colleagues or I enquired across the globe, we got that first meeting.
A Strong Brand Enables Sales Team Productivity
Nowadays, when senior clients, board members and others ask me, ‘why should we invest in brand, we are a sales-driven business,’ I say, ‘as a salesperson working on behalf of my client Kodak, I always got a meeting with the decision maker. The brand opened the door to a warm and positive conversation… every time.’
That is more cost effective, faster, and a heck of a lot more motivating for the sales team than the seven-plus-follow-ups-before-a-response that is the current rule of thumb.
Branding Drives B2B Company Growth
Joel Satin, VP of Business Development and Sales for Kodak Brand Licensing puts it this way, ‘Kodak moved up the chart from #123 to #84 among Top 150 Global Licensed Brands in just 3 years in part because we were able to leverage the brand’s heritage and all those years of investment to get new licensees excited about the future potential.’
Now I know that young companies don’t have the 132 year old brand heritage or the budgets to invest at the level that Kodak did in its heyday, but they can have the foresight to prudently invest in their brands from the beginning to ensure their success well into the future.
Want to know more, get in touch: katherine@torrencemarketing.com