Driving Sales and Marketing Alignment

Matching Brand Promise to Customer Reality

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What B2B company doesn’t want a powerful brand that draws customers and makes the competition green with envy? After all, a compelling brand can influence buying decisions, justify higher prices, transcend cultural barriers, and create deep and lasting loyalty among customers. But in the quest to find and project the perfect brand, many b-to-b leaders risk aligning their businesses with misleading and even false brand promises that simply don’t reflect their customers’ experience or the core competencies of the organization.

Marketers have experienced increased demand to deliver a continuous stream of highly qualified leads to a sales force under tremendous pressure. The inevitable result has been an intense focus on short-term revenue supporting efforts while longer-term strategies have taken a back seat. This shift from long-term growth strategies to short-term revenue generation means that many B2B CMOs have turned their focus away from (among other things) customer experience management at critical touch points, including products/services, customer service and web sites. While short-term cash flow remains critical, leading B2B organizations understand that ignoring customer experience management could be a recipe for disaster.

This decline in attending to customer experience can lay the foundation for negative perceptions that will last long after the economy picks up and spending increases. As much as B2B marketing is about doing what is necessary to achieve near-term financial goals, an equally important responsibility is creating and maintaining a lasting, powerful (and positive) perception of the company. That’s exactly where brand comes into play. It’s through the lens of brand and its associated promise that buyers measure their experiences with the company; therefore, brands that don’t align with the typical customer experience are doing far more harm than good.

Also, due to the explosion of social media, B2B customers and buyers have very visible channels for expressing their opinions, as well as increased access to the opinions of others — and as we all know, this new customer empowerment has changed the B2B world forever. For example, a Google search for virtually any company won’t just reveal links to the company website and relevant information pages; customer reviews, raves and rants will often pop up within the first page of Google results. It is increasingly clear that customers who have been given a voice through social media now have as much influence over how a company is perceived as marketers at the company. 

While astute B2B companies can play this magnified customer voice to their advantage by identifying and closing gaps between their brand promise and customer reality, businesses that don’t take action are putting themselves at serious risk. The new transparency that exists in the typical business/customer relationship means that businesses with customer experience management strategies that aren’t aligned with their brand message risk damaging their reputation, their relationships with customers and their future sales.