Traction

Boosting Traction

 
We hear constantly about getting traction — with customers, channel partners, investors, and the media. What is traction? The “grip” your brand has on Marketplace Road.

When your brand resonates viscerally with these constituents, you can — at minimum cost — sell to them, move products through them, raise capital from them, and influence their news, respectively.

Think of your brand as tire tread, the marketplace as a snowstorm. Without good traction, you spin your wheels or slide off the road — in essence, maximizing your costs of sales, capital, and media placement.
 

Weak Brand => Poor Traction

 
Boosting traction is the endlessly iterative process of building GutShare™, sharpening the brand — keeping it relevant. No company should ever feel secure enough to rest.
 

Steve Balmer’s Out to Make Microsoft Relevant Again

 
If customers, investors, and journalists constantly ask you to explain your company, “once again,” you have bald tires: poor traction, a weak brand. Why Can’t Yahoo Explain Itself?

With bald tires, it takes more fuel and more time to reach your destination — if you get there at all. There’s no excuse for tolerating and living with a weak brand.
 

Three Steps to Boosting Traction

 
1. Ensure That Customer Needs Drive Everything

 
After determining market needs, make the resultant marketing strategy drive the offering, channels, communications and events, and salesforce behavior. I always zealously fought internecine resistance to this necessary discipline, enforcing tight linkage of all the steps shown above.

If, however, your company has a strong “engineering” culture, it’s likely that the geeks will use a brand extinguisher to subordinate market needs to their infatuation with technology (I call this technologica erotica) and eradicate your traction.
 

2. Keep Messaging Unified

 
Using a musical metaphor, messaging to each constituent group must be a variation on a central theme. For a publicly traded software company, I took a theme of “integrating the enterprise” and tailored it to the disparate agendas of banks and systems integrators.
 

3. Tightly Couple Sales & Marketing Vectors

 
A common mistake CEOs make is accepting unlinked sales and marketing vectors, which are similar yet different and, therefore, must complement and support each other. Vendors get the best traction when sales pitches and branding messages are in-sync.

NOTE: Salespeople are commissioned; if you don’t tell them what to say, they’ll make it up as they go along. If your brand is weak, you’ll have nothing unique, concise, and compelling to tell them. Talk about spinning your wheels!