Originally published in Forbes

By Randy Illig

Organizations invest so much money and energy into innovating products and services, developing marketing resources, and defining a compelling brand. And those elements are essential—but they all live or die by what ultimately happens between the seller and the buyer.

For the past decade, I’ve been sharing the idea that the customer buying experience is every organization’s “flash point.” If that experience isn’t competitively distinct, enjoyable, and valuable to the customer, those other seemingly vital investments you made will be minimized—or worse, rendered inconsequential.

Great organizations usually have well-developed marketing brand strategies, but you rarely hear about organizations that define a sales brand strategy that would structure the “flash point” experience. It’s time to change that.

A sales brand strategy clearly defines how your sales force will represent your brand to clients throughout the sales process. And most sales leaders have completely missed this strategic lever.

York Risk is one exception. Their chief marketing officer, Maria Conry, has been approaching this idea from the marketing perspective, as I’ve been looking at it from the sales perspective. So we recently discussed a framework for consistently bringing a brand alive through a B2B sales force.

Define your brand.

Your brand is your foundation. It’s who you are, how you sound, what you look like and how clients feel when they engage with you. The brand needs to infiltrate every part of the organization.

Maria emphasizes that people buy with an emotional connection, even—or perhaps especially—in B2B environments. To humanize a brand, organizations can define a “buyer persona,” or traits and attributes that describe the brand as if it were a person. Use those traits as a filter for everything you do as an organization. Every single touchpoint, every element of the customer experience should reflect those traits.

Done well, the brand experience can differentiate your organization when you’re selling a product or service that is very comparable to your competitors.

Align your brand to the sales cycle/process.

The sales team is critical in bringing your brand experience to life. Using your brand traits as a filter, look at every detail of the customer journey. Consistency is the goal. The sales experience should reflect those brand traits you’ve defined in Step 1.

Be explicit about how your brand traits manifest in each stage of the sale. Map out how the sales team should bring the brand experience to life.

• How does your client first connect with your organization? Who is answering their inquiry or who is reaching out to them? What do they say?
• When your sales team is having a dialogue with the client, how are they talking to them? Go granular: what does the meeting invitation look like through email? How do you frame the agenda so that it is strategic and ensures the prospective buyer knows that they’re going to discuss goals and objectives, not just products?
• How does your sales force show up during a client meeting? How are they prepared with what’s in their hands or on the table? How do they talk about your organization’s story? What does the presentation look like? How do they carry a dialogue with their colleagues in front of the client? What does their thank you look like? Is it custom? Is it digital? Is it bringing to life your organization for your prospective clients and making them feel like it’s already a partnership?

Think like a retailer.

Remember that the same trends affecting consumers are also affecting our B2B buyers. Retail is prescriptive with every aspect of the selling experience, whether in stores, online, or even with their packaging. Retail clearly defines how their people bring their brand to life, from how they greet customers when they walk into the store to how they pick up the phone.

In B2B organizations, the salesperson is essentially the equivalent of the B2C store, but sales professionals have an opportunity to create an even richer dialogue. So as you’re mapping your customer buying experience, think like a retailer: intentionally design every touchpoint and leverage those details that add up to a unique experience.

Support the sales force with tools.

Your tools should allow for automation, authenticity and brand consistency. It’s a balance of keeping communication efficient yet personalized and on-brand. Give your sales force marketing and brand tools that allow them to customize messages and equip them throughout the customer buying experience that you’ve outlined, so the client doesn’t feel like they’re simply getting generic responses.

Organizationally embrace the sales brand strategy from top to bottom.

This process can be difficult to execute when sales teams have their own way of doing things. They might be quite successful with the status quo, in which case you may encounter resistance to a new, more brand-aligned process. To help the transition, your leadership should clearly communicate, “This is how we represent ourselves.” Create and train your sales force on your sales brand standards. Emphasize the importance of modeling these traits from the top down.

A final note: To execute a sales brand strategy, you must ensure that there isn’t a disconnect between what marketing is putting out in the marketplace and how sales is interacting with clients. Unfortunately, sales and marketing are often siloed, which means neither department is as effective as they could be. For a sales brand to be a powerful go-to-market strategy, sales and marketing need to come together to align and integrate their approaches—which might take a new level of humility and collaboration from both divisions.

Randy Illig is global leader of FranklinCovey’s Sales Performance Practice.