Can organizational values help B-2-B brands sell?

In B-2-B selling, the product is often a consulting or outsourcing engagement and employees from both companies will have to work together to make the project a success. In this case organizational values can be leveraged to strengthen the prospect’s belief that your employees and their employees can work well together.

When I was working on a corporate brand team I was asked to work on a bid for a consulting and systems outsourcing contract with a global airline. Our company was one of two finalists and we knew both our bids were very close in proposed solution and price. The challenge had come down to which of us would be the better fit for the airline and its employees.

Our competition was truthfully asserting that most of our employees had little or no experience working for an airline while most of their employees actually held positions at an airline prior to joining their company. They were claiming this would make it harder if not impossible for the prospect's employees to work with our company. To demonstrate to our prospect that our cultures could meld and work together we needed to find a connection point that enabled our teams to establish a collegial relationship and drive success for the airline. Because our core business was technology and their core business was travel, we had to go back to the core values of both companies to build a foundation for success.

By digging deep into the background and history of both our companies we found that their core values mentioned nothing about flying airplanes. Their core value was about enabling their customers to have an outstanding travel experience from the time they first contacted the airline to the time they left the airport at their final destination. Our company’s core value was not about technology, but about enabling our client’s success, regardless of their business or industry. Through additional reviews we found that although we were in different industries, at the values level we were completely aligned. .

By using the values of both companies as a foundation, we were able to demonstrate to the airline CEO and CTO that if you looked at both our companies through the lens of organizational values, we had compatible cultures and we could work together to a common objective.

For our final presentation to the CEO and his executive team, we presented our technological recommendations in the context of our values. We then shared quotes from their CEO in newspapers and articles to show we had a shared vision about how companies should relate to their customers.

We built charts with specific examples of how our recommendations would deliver on our values and how we had done so in the past. By incorporating similar stories about their brand we were able to demonstrate that we understood their company, respected their culture and were well prepared to help them achieve their objectives.

Ultimately we won the business by enabling our prospect to trust us to come inside their company and deliver on our recommendation. When we were notified that we won the bid, the CEO told us we differentiated ourselves not just by our recommendations, but by the way we asked for the business.