We often see businesses isolate their sales and marketing efforts and to a great extent treat branding as one-and-done. While on the surface this may sound like a viable strategy, the reality is that these three activities have a very synergistic effect on the performance of a company.

Let’s take a look at each of these areas, what their purpose is and how they work in concert with each other.

Branding
Branding is the ongoing, strategic process of shaping and positioning the company’s reputation, in order to build long-term trust and awareness in the market.

Marketing
Marketing is the effort to actively promote the company or products, generate leads, and create connections with potential customers through campaigns, tactics, and processes.

Sales
Sales is the effort to turn an interested lead into a purchasing customer through one-on-one relationship building and specific tailored conversations and actions.

The ongoing communication between branding, marketing and sales can be best illustrated by this diagram. Starting with branding, it sets the tone and messaging. Marketing is then responsible for promoting the brand and providing sales with the materials they need to represent the company. Sales in turn can then provide feedback to branding and marketing so continual improvements and adjustments can be made.

As you can see the communication between branding, marketing, and sales is a continual process.  When this dynamic is lacking or inconsistent it becomes difficult to successfully track and measure the effectiveness of the efforts of all three activities. Another consequence of a lack of synergy is inconsistent brand messaging which can cause confusion internally with the team and externally with the perception of the brand. This contributes to a fragmented customer experience and creates a feeling of mistrust of the brand. 

Look no further than these statistics to see the results when all three activities are either in alignment or not. 

• Organizations with tightly aligned sales and marketing functions enjoy 36% higher customer retention rates. (marketingprofs.com)
• Only 8% of companies have strong alignment between their sales and marketing departments. (forrester.com)
• Companies with “dynamic, adaptable sales and marketing processes” report an average of 10% more sales people on-quota compared to other companies. (cosinsights.com)
• 76% of content marketers forget sales enablement. (hubspot.com)
• Sales and marketing alignment can help your company become 67% better at closing deals. (marketo.com)
• 65% of sales reps say they can’t find content to send to prospects. (kapost.com)

So how do you begin to implement a dynamic relationship between brand, marketing, and sales? The best place to start is with your brand. Does it truly resonate with your target market? Is it in alignment with your revenue and business goals? From there you can begin to make adjustments to your marketing and sales strategy, ensuring it touches all aspects of your business and gives you the results you’re looking for.

If your business is growing, you can no longer afford to ignore the misalignment between brand, marketing, and sales. Contact us to learn more about how we can help guide and shape your efforts.