4-Minute Read
When it comes to your brand standards, high expectations are a given, but not always followed. There is nothing worse than seeing your company logo stretched, squished, pixelated, or missing, when you have worked so hard to ensure your brand is presented consistently.
Brand Governance vs. the Sales Department
Unfortunately, challenges with brand governance occur more frequently than anyone would like. It’s easy to point fingers at the abusers of the brand standards within the company, but the truth is it’s an effect, not the cause, of your brand governance issues.
Do you have any of these repeat offenders at your company?
The ‘Butcher’: A sales person creating his or her own presentation without adhering to the template to ‘get it out to the prospect faster.’
The ‘Save to Desktop’: Outdated versions of presentations or materials shared with a prospect or existing clients.
The ‘I Forgot’: Sales team member that neglects to use – or completely forgets about – the assets that were created to help them sell despite trainings and meetings.
The ‘I Like My Way’: This sales person sees certain CRM tracking and lead scoring requests as a waste of time. They are less likely to adopt new marketing materials into their process despite the traction other sales people are getting.
Brand Governance vs. Marketing Capacity
Poor brand governance can also lead to reduced marketing capacity. Have you ever experienced any of these frustrations?
The ‘Archive Folder’: It takes a lot of time to refresh your marketing materials to include new information or messaging. Too often, your previous hard work ends up sitting in a ‘to do’ list instead of updated, until it is ultimately banished to the ‘Archive’ folder. Think about all that time and effort lost!
The ‘Full Menu’: When you spend a lot of time and energy creating a large, all-encompassing presentation about all the product features and services, only to realize you don’t have an easy way to show a prospective client only what they are interested in. Customizing for each high-priority sales lead with account based marketing techniques can seem like an endless workload.
The ‘Lost at sea’: Not focusing on benefits and differentiation can leave your presentations underwhelming and forgettable. You already know that you need to stand out from the competition, but you feel like you don’t have the capacity or budget to get you there.
The ‘Elusive ROI’: A lack of analytics and integrations to tie back your marketing efforts prevent you from tracking performance and getting a full funnel look at what’s working. This makes it nearly impossible for your team to make data-driven updates or improvements to your collateral, which means your marketing capacity isn’t tuned-in to what is moving the needle.
Take Back Control of Your Brand
There are a series of ways, however, to address these repeat offenders and frustrations when focusing on brand governance.
First, determine your marketing team capacity. Customization can stretch your marketing team if you aren’t using the right tools, but there are simple ways to kill two birds with one stone such as using one platform or tool as your “single source of the truth”.
Then, research modern presentation solutions that will enable you to:
- Control your brand with a Master Deck while giving your sales team a customizable and user-friendly platform to mold for each pitch. Kiss your brand governance worries goodbye. Choose which portions of the presentation can be modified while ensuring other sections are untouchable and unable to be changed or edited all in the same platform.
- Solve the problem of not having exactly what your client is looking for. Features like Preselects allow team members to quickly select categories such as region, product, or persona to create a presentation tailormade to each and every client.
- Never worry again about someone sharing outdated information. With Global Updates, the most up-to-date information will be pushed through to all the presentations, both past and present, created from the Master Deck, even if they have already been presented.
- Provide an experience for potential clients, not just a presentation. With unlimited Multimedia, you are able to create a compelling experience and then use that same experience to collect real-time analytics. Analytics allow you to see what portions of the presentations resonate most with your clients, and alert you every time someone is viewing your presentation.
Brand governance works best when everyone – including sales – sees the benefits of providing a unified experience. One way to ensure this is by allowing just enough flexibility with customization so that everyone feels empowered to follow the brand guidelines while still being able to personalize to each qualified lead. This creates advocates within your organization and can allow for modern marketing techniques such as account based marketing to gain momentum to reach your sales and marketing goals. Let DIGIDECK help solve your brand governance issues today.
