Part 1: Four Steps to ensuring marketing and brand consistency across sales and channel partners

Marketing operations is the “final frontier” for the explosion in business process efficiencies driven by technology, according to an article that quotes AMR research.  That article was published in 2003, and here we are in 2005 with the same state of affairs -- it might as well have been posted this month.  What is it that isn't communicating or being understood?  Post a comment, let's take a look.   

Internet technology is one of the most powerful tools for ensuring brand consistency, however, beyond CRM, companies seldom prioritize information technology as mission critical for marketing and sales. This may be due to the fast pace of marketing and sales and its individual nature, which make it difficult for marketing and sales organizations to fully take advantage of.

Ensuring brand consistency across all marketing and sales channels isn’t just about logo placement or font type. Branding encompasses all the conversations that describe your product and company. This includes reaching target audiences with the messages that communicate distinctly to them, and coordinating across product lines and sales channels to ensure that these messages, including look and feel, are presented in a manner consistent with the brand.

In today’s reality, achieving this level of marketing effectiveness means employing technology to connect, communicate, collaborate, and entertain whatever audience you are targeting. Two groups with the biggest impact on how you reach these audiences are your sales department and channel partners who directly promote your brand. Inaccurate marketing materials can lead to misunderstanding of a product or line but more commonly it just means missed sales.

But don’t despair, getting on track is not impossible. In a series of posts, we are going to explore the four steps that can help your company align its branding and ensure marketing consistentency.

1. Expose the existing culture – Determine whether your sales people suffer from your technology or are empowered by it.
2. Market in-house – Use the power of your marketing department to enroll and empower your sales and channel partners on the effectiveness of the messages.
3. Create trust –Give sales the tools they need and offer incentives to use them.
4. Automate redundant processes

I invite you to play with these ideas, and provide your own thinking and insights -- have the ideas make sense -- common sense!