Brand building and relationship development for business growth
Having been an executive, board member and advisor in both early stage startups and mature growth-focused companies, I was asked, in 2016, to write an Op-Ed about the “Value of Networking in Scaling a Startup,” for Iceland Monitor, the English-language news site of Icelandic media brand MBL.IS. I am told often that people are still reading this post, four years on. Understanding the value of networking and network nurturing is an evergreen necessity for business success, and often one of the most overlooked. It’s a topic I speak on regularly at international business conferences, at universities and when advising companies.
Likewise, brand building (in tandem with brand protection) is essential to a number of business pipelines: sales, investment, media, talent sourcing and operations. Network development plays an integral part in every stage of a brand’s lifecycle, whether in launching a go-to-market strategy, implementing a growth plan or ensuring market leadership.
As Float and gather approaches its one year anniversary, I thought I’d take some time to pick up where that 2016 article, and my talks across the US and Europe since, have left off. Let’s walk through brand building and relationship development (networking) for companies, with an occasional anecdote from my own processes.
Some of the key elements of brand and network-building include:
Defining and re-defining your story and your visual presence in the world regularly
Establishing and maintaining product/service integrity and brand trust
Building and scaling sales and business development pipelines (and processes!)
Establishing and nurturing brand advocates and brand affinity to support growth
Defining brand story
Why are you here?
What was the impetus for the product or service you’re offering? What led this idea, above all other ideas, to be the one you took to market? Who is it for? What’s the big dream? What is your brand’s ethos?
The answers to these questions inform the foundation of your brand story.
When bringing Float and gather to life, for example, I considered my accruement of experiences, skills, passions and approach. I spent time figuring out what I wanted to offer clients, their customers and what imprint I wanted to have on the world: I knew I had the talent and track record for using my creativity, diligence and problem solving to help brilliant companies grow.
I also deeply considered what I wanted Float and gather to offer me, my future employees and partners. What kind of clients and people do I want to attract: great talent, partners and clients with big, problem-solving ideas and a dedication to bringing solutions to life.
Likewise, in visually representing the Float and gather brand, I got to the root of what I wanted the brand, and eventually my team, to communicate: Float and gather nurtures the germination of ideas. With the right strategic elements and experience, Float and gather helps ensure those ideas bear fruit for its clients. Float and gather then works with these brilliant companies to implement strategic plans, so that the most rewarding market opportunities rise to the top. In short, Float and gather is a growth harvester for brilliant companies.
Both your messaging and visual messaging communicate to an audience where you see yourself in your market segment, what your aspirations are and who you are trying to attract, or with whom you are trying to align.
Establishing integrity and brand trust
In addition to establishing a brand’s identity, it is critical, as a company matures, to continually commit to the evolution of a brand’s story, incorporating acquired thought leadership, market data, experiences, external validation and future goals. This reinforces brand affinity, reliability and trust, fostering longevity.
People want to know that the products or services they are buying and / or using can be relied upon to work the way they are supposed to work and adapt to changing needs. Integrity is born of reliability, consistency and accountability, principles that should be integral to every area of your business.
Brand trust is built upon this integrity. If partners, consumers, employees and shareholders can trust that the company is, and will always be, operating with integrity, people will trust that brand over its competitors.
Executives and entrepreneurs know, for example, that they can trust Float and gather with their brand, to help them create go-to-market and growth strategies tailored to their needs, earnestly evaluating opportunities and potential barriers to their success, whether operational or market segment factors. They also trust that Float and gather’s feedback, analysis and strategy will be candid, honest and unique to them.
Having a solid foundation of brand trust and integrity will also enable a company to mitigate a potential snowball effect when something goes wrong, and inevitably something always goes wrong. This gives the company and its team the space and support needed to correct its course.
Having a network of brand advocates, who enthusiastically provide feedback or who evangelize on a brand’s behalf, can mitigate or minimize technological bugs, augment and amplify key messaging and support the morale of a team in times of celebration, as well as, challenges.
In short, be sure to place great value and effort on building, maintaining and protecting your brand’s integrity and trust at every stage of your company.
Building and scaling sales and business development pipelines
If you’re an established company, you’ve probably communicated your brand story, product story and you’re successfully selling your product/service. You’ve invested in marketing (whether with time or cash) and have grown your business revenue.
What’s next?
Continue to invest. Invest in getting your brilliant story, your exceptional product and services, in front of eyes, ears and wallets. If you have carved out capital for your marketing programs, great. If you lack budget compared to your competitors, your investment is time, developing co-marketing partners and brand advocates. Be mindful that whatever market share you’re leaving on the table, your competitors are surely harvesting.
Consider too, the investment in brand building and network development (partners, customers, fans) over myopic, sales-only advertising, particularly in early stages. Inevitably, a brand with a strong trust factor and deep network of partners, customers and advocates reduces sales cycles and increases speed to revenue. It also minimizes your chances of competing on cost factor alone, a race to the bottom.
Integrate brand in every aspect of communications: team, product, partner, customer, sales.
Use your CRM (Customer Relationship Management) strategically. If you don’t use a CRM system now, you can choose a free or low cost monthly service (be sure this has portability, in case you want to later upgrade to an SME / Enterprise service). Even a spreadsheet or your email’s contact database is better than nothing, for now.*
Make sure your CRM analysis is cross-functional. Your executive, marketing, sales, customer success and product teams are all stakeholders in the CRM process. Make sure to establish uniform tagging and hand off processes. You’d be surprised how many large companies fail in this area.
Factor in external variables that can hinder success or present opportunities, such as market shifts, trends, global supply chain, politics… a pandemic...
Make following up and following through a part of your brand and networking practices.
Collect and analyze the data. This is such a critical component to success. Yet, siloed organizations, more often than not, neglect to make use of valuable communications data. Or, worse, organizations don’t know what data to analyze.
What caused the customer to convert (win analysis)? Was it the product? If so, what features? Was it the team? If so, what about them won the customer over? Is it the brand or brand story? What elements of the brand and story?
What caused someone to pass you over for your competition (loss analysis)? What caused customer attrition (churn)?
Do you regularly conduct SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Threats and Opportunities)?
Why are you attracting exceptional talent? Equally, and maybe more importantly, why are you losing talent?
Develop ICPs (Ideal Customer Profiles).
Create personas around your ideal customers, leveraging data collected from the industries, competitors, sales cycle stakeholders and sales closing processes. There are likely to be several different ICPs and personas.
Identify and use the unique qualities of your brand and products that will pique the interest of these ICPs.
Establish brand KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that you review continually:
Increases in organic traffic, follows and engagement to the brand’s site, social media and content
Brand word-of-mouth has increased inbound sales leads, conversions and revenue
Business and/or consumer media and influential voices are mentioning and featuring the brand, products and executives positively, without prompt
Brand messaging in being mirrored back to the company by established target ICPs
The brand is now a verb
In every decision that supports the business development (and network development) and increase in brand affinity, take into consideration:
Eliminate brand scaling hurdles
Figure out the friction point for when your efforts need to be delegated to additional staff or external services. Also, pay attention to the little things that take up time. Some often-unforeseen brand and communications scaling hurdles to address include:
If you’re a growth company, using your email contact database to manage outreach and relationship nurturing (*de facto CRM), how will you port these contacts and tasks to the person/people who take over these activities, as your team grows and your roles shift? How is historical activity archived and used? What’s your CRM and Task Management Software plan? Are different departments using different systems (Jira and Trello? Salesforce and Hubspot? Why not one or the other?).
How well do you communicate your brand, brand messaging and visuals to your team, partners, customers, board, shareholders, vendors and media? Are they adopting the most current messaging? Using the most current graphics and logos?
If you’re developing your brand or scaling to support it, have you secured the brand guide, fonts, palette and imagery and correct finalized assets in the file formats and shared folders that are accessible to the teams and partners who need them (jpg, png, ai, eps, pdf… pantone, RGB, CMYK, hex values… print-friendly fonts, web-friendly fonts)? What’s the naming convention and house cleaning process to ensure the folders are always up to date, easy to find and old assets are properly archived?
If you have manual processes, take a hard look at where you can automate them.
While these activities sound like common sense, you’d be surprised how much extra time, money and talent goes into repeating and executing these tasks.
If you’re expanding brand reach to new markets or have discovered you’re brand isn’t resonating with key targets, have you conducted research and analysis on your brand or solution’s value to different industries, geographies or interest groups?
How can you adapt the brand messaging and visuals to speak to these markets? What’s the data saying and not saying?
Have you inadvertently isolated your brand with bias, speaking only to a fraction of your audience? Are you consciously or unconsciously disingenuous?
It’s important to look at brand feedback constructively and proactively adapt.
Establishing brand advocates
In most cases, a company is born out of a desire or need to have something or fix something. For whom did you create the solution? Yourself? Your family? Your friends or colleagues? THEY ARE YOUR FIRST CUSTOMERS. And really, anyone who is just like them, who has the same challenge, need or desire could be too. They can also be nurtured as early brand advocates. Your team is also your best brand advocacy arsenal.
Who loves you?
Brand advocates are people and companies (so, people in those companies) who have an affinity, a strong belief and love, for your brand, product and service. They are a critical component to success of the sales pipeline, business development, brand visibility, media relations (and general 3rd party advocacy/ validation), talent acquisition and supporting the overall marketing strategy. In short, they’re integral to business growth and sustainability.
Establishing brand advocates begins in the early stages of business and marketing strategies. If your plan does not include “how to build, nurture and leverage advocates” it may be time to re-evaluate your plans and augment them.
Who, of your existing employees, customers and partners, are showing early affinity for your brand and products? Are they willing to authentically profess their love for your brand?
Are there advocates out there you didn’t nurture, but have emerged on their own? Engage them.
Does the sales team, customer success team, marketing team and executive team have access to them? Do they utilize them effectively?
Do you have brand advocacy and marketing disclosure statements in your customer contracts? (You should).
How are you rewarding and incentivizing advocates?
Brand advocates — engaged brand advocates— in addition to professing their love for your brand and augmenting your marketing and sales initiatives, give early insight into market shifts, trends and feedback on new product development, rollouts and early channel development (channel = sales /distribution).
In creating Float and gather, for example, I knew my track record for success (my own and that of companies for which I’ve helped foster success), my reputation for having integrity and my dedication to providing thoughtful, informed opinions and strategies, would be foundational to my ability to attract new projects. I leverage and encourage my network to keep Float and gather in mind, and serve as brand advocates, when their brands, or brands in their network, need assistance with the next phase of their life cycle, whether it’s early go-to-market or a need to evaluate and plan for market growth.