Can Your Customers Articulate The Problems You Solve?

To whom it may concern (aka anyone who has a job): If I asked you and your manager what problems your company solves, would the answer be the same?

What about if we asked every member of your company — how different would the answers be? For those of you who feel the answers might be different, why is that? What would you need to communicate with your manager or your colleagues to ensure a different outcome?

Alternatively, if we asked your customers, “What value does this company offer, and what problems does it solve?”, would their answer be the same? It can be scary to think about what your customers might say. Some might argue that it’s unrealistic for all three answers to align — however, I believe that the most successful companies ensure consistency of their brand across all channels they use to communicate to the marketplace.

The Consequences Of Not Having Brand Consistency

As a leader in our firm, I am focused on ensuring that our associates realize the negative consequences of poorly communicated value to customers — written or verbal. I’ve learned that training and inspecting what your employees are saying to your customers is vital to your business success. Just as important, what they are communicating through social media can also have a dramatic impact on your business.

Let’s imagine the negative impact on your business if you don’t have a consistent message. Here are some scenarios that come to mind that hopefully make you think about whether this is a gap in your service offering:

? Loss of current and/or future revenue

? Decreased morale due to inconsistencies

? Low or negative Net Promoter Score (NPS) from your customers

These three metrics alone are a good reason to consider your message. As an analogy, sports teams watch film of their games and practices to ensure they are always inspecting the little things so that they are done the correct way. For any business, it’s important to check yourself and your brand often so that the message you are sending will align with your company’s goals and objectives.

To Fix Your Messaging, You Must Identify Your Value Drivers

I am passionate about brand consistency because it is one of the key things we have control over as sellers of goods and services. We provide staffing and solutions for 70% of the Fortune 100, so having control of our brand is crucial. In order to grow the business, our sales force must go to market with a consistent message.

However, in my travels of late, I’ve found gaps that I am working to fix now to ensure our brand is consistent and that our sales team and customers understand the four top-of-mind business issues we solve (value drivers). For us, those four drivers are as follows:

? We help companies acquire the right talent for their organizations more efficiently.

? We provide companies with consultative and strategic guidance in specific domain areas of their business.

? We protect our clients from internal and external regulatory and compliance related business matters.

? We assist our clients in completing projects more effectively through our disciplined knowledge staffing and solutions process.

How can you identify what drives your own customers to take action?

First, don’t let this question intimidate you. Keep it simple and don’t be afraid to ask your customers open-ended questions (TED-based questions: Tell me, Explain for me, or Describe for me) that will help you get the answers to the test. My company was fortunate as we partnered with an outside firm, Force Management, to survey and interview our customers. But even in the event that your company is not in a position to hire an outside firm, you can easily build training with your sales team for data collection or survey your customers through multiple choice questions to find out which of your offerings most resonates with your customer.

Five Steps To Fix Brand Inconsistencies

Once this data is collected, you can begin to build consistent messaging that will effectively train your sales teams toward driving a simple and consistent message — one that can be consumed by every customer.

If you find that there are gaps in how your team communicates the problems you solve or the services you provide, below are some actions that I’ve found useful in ensuring a consistent brand for customer messaging and adoption:

? Ensure that your mission statement and objectives align across all your marketing and sales channels.

? Inspect your social media channels to see if there is consistency in the message you’re sharing with the market.

? Follow your employees who are active on social media to ensure they are consistent.

? Evaluate your messaging and align it with your social and face-to-face customer interactions.

? Inspect and ensure that your leaders are training your teams in a consistent manner.

My firm is far from perfect, and we have a long way to go — as do most companies in driving brand consistency. But, I can tell you after we’ve interviewed some of our most strategic customers, these four business value drivers are what compel our customers to call us and take action.

Now, it’s your turn to share your thoughts. I would love to hear from you on challenges you’ve solved from a brand perspective. What problems did you uncover, and how did you solve them? Please leave a comment below so that we can all learn from each other.