Communications – closer then you think
Was at a company recently; walked into the reception area, and heard the receptionist answer a question on the company, “Yes, we make the product XXX and that is our specialty; can I connect you to one of our salespeople?”.
I then went to meet with the company’s VP of Sales. She sat down in front of me (we were now in a conference room), and said (after all the formal introductions, etc.), “We are specialists in providing back-end software to the enterprise market; even though the world knows us for the few hardware products we provide. Our target is the enterprise market, bringing state-of-the-art software to their internal systems and integrating some of our unique hardware. How can we get the market to see what our company offers and get the market to understand what we do?”
Of course, I had to mention what I heard in the front lobby. “You know,” I said, “I heard your receptionist state that your company is a specialist in hardware solutions, product XXX. When you just came in, you said that your company were specialists in a different product. Which one is it? You called Xbrand because you didn’t think that the market understood what you did. I think the issue covers more then just the general market. I think your employee’s also don’t know what your company does and provides, and aren’t coordinated with the messaging that you want to project out to the market.”
Over the next few weeks, we put together a training and messaging program for the company, from the receptionist to the CEO. We came to understand, through the discovery process of what employee’s understood to be the companies mission, that each division had their own idea of what that message is. Within a month, the company was all communicating the same message to the outside world.
Don’t ignore inside the company when you are trying to put out a consistent message. Many times, the trouble starts at home.
