Unlocking Brand Insights: The Critical Role of Sales Teams in B2B

This might sound counterintuitive, but the more consultancy work we do in the B2B space, the more we find that the real insights around solving brand challenges come from talking to the sales team, not the marketing team.

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Quite often the two teams are disconnected or set up in an adversarial relationship – which is bad all round. But, from our perspective, the sales team generally has an invaluable grasp on the brand and the challenges their customers have with it.

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Even if they do see eye to eye, you always get a different perspective. And we think that they deliver the best insights, uncovering frictions, frustrations and misunderstandings that are never seen around a boardroom table.

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The Reality of Customer Perception

Sales teams get us out of the office – which is where we generally start our engagement with clients. These guys are out on the road meeting customers and contacts and experiencing the reality of how customers perceive the brand.

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Contrast this with the usual sanitised boardroom experience, tainted with inside out bias. I’m pretty sceptical of polished slide decks offering certainty about customer archetypes, or simplified target groups. In my time I’ve learned that the reality is more organic and complicated than one of these slick presentations would have you believe. It’s worrying how these nuggets of information can quickly pervade corporate thinking and establish themselves as received wisdom around the boardroom table.

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I’m not saying the internal, marketing led view is wrong, it’s extremely useful from an orientation point of view and it offers a much broader context. But when you’re ready, you really can’t beat hearing the unfiltered feedback from the sales teams.

Uncovering Frictions and Misunderstandings

This feedback frequently differs from the position of their marketing colleagues and when they’re factored into a marketing or comms plan, it strengthens the brand’s relevance during the sale.

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For example, on one occasion we were doing sales teams interviews for a big B2B client, and it became clear that marketing and sales were on different pages. Marketing had primed us to believe that the customer valued the design and innovation approach to product development and that this ‘value’ should lead the brand message. When we interviewed the sales teams, it became clear that their first-hand belief was that the customer was more engaged with a holistic message about the entire product portfolio and how this provided entire ‘solutions’ to the customer. The tension here is positive. Even though these two sentiments are different, we were able to reconcile both into a stronger customer message with this understanding.

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The Value of Customer Feedback

In fact, even better than talking to sales teams is talking to customers themselves. This isn’t always possible, but it’s worth asking. The feedback and understanding enriches the project and outputs massively.

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I remember an example when we were talking to a client’s customers about their portfolio of products. We quickly realised that they didn’t see the name of the product in the portfolio as important; they were just used to ordering the same one as last time. (Hint: the brand equity lies in the mother brand; not in the product brand). This kind of feedback isn’t earth shattering in isolation but does have a profound effect on what sort of brand strategy we recommended to the client.

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And when I say customers, I don’t just mean the ‘friends of the family’. I mean the ones that are unhappy, or who recently switched to another brand. These are the ones where the real seams of gold are to be found. I do appreciate that this can be a big ask for the client. It takes bravery and I do respect those that lean in.

Building Alliances and Strengthening Clients

Our objective and outside perspective gives us a sense of immunity from the politics that are always present in large corporates. And in my experience, this always leaves a positive legacy. Being able to thread the needle between marketing and sales and come through with a solution that’s truly customer focused is not only a positive thing for the main brand; it can reenergise both parties and can leave them with a renewed sense of partnership in delivering value for the organisation. This can only be a good thing over the long term.

The Agency Benefit

All this client interaction – particularly with sales teams – delivers a huge dollop of value to the agency team too. Sales teams don’t play around pontificating about brand. They’re pragmatic. They need to make calls, decisions and visits, oftentimes very quickly and robustly. This toughens up agency people to the reality of the fight or flight reflex of selling. For us at Good this is a very important commercial reality that our people need to learn as soon as they’re in the door. Brand strategy is business strategy. Follow the money and you’ll be in a more influential position to argue about where an organisation chooses to spend its brand budget. They’ll quickly learn that that most important thing isn’t to immediately talk about rebrands, creative concepts and colours, but to truly understand how the brand is perceived by its customers and what it can do to ‘release the handbrake’ to the sale.

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Brand Strategy is Business Strategy

This is our mantra at Good. There’s no point in messing around with brand unless it’s aligned to a wider business strategy. And it’s my view one of the best ways to make sure the brand is delivering value is to understand how the sales team are using ‘brand’ to contribute to a sale. So, although you can often say that marketing is from Mars and sales is from Saturn, agencies should work hard to bridge the gap. There’s always going to be value there.