Traction

Boosting Traction

We hear constantly about getting traction — with customers, channel partners, investors, and the media. Your brand is tire tread; the marketplace is a snowstorm. Without traction, you spin your wheels or slide off the road. 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.

If customers, investors, and journalists constantly ask you to explain, “once again,” what it is your company does, you have bald tires: poor traction, a weak brand. 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 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 your company has a strong “engineering” culture, you’ll likely encounter many branding barriers.
 

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.

Remember: Salespeople are commissioned; if you don’t tell them what to say, they’ll make it up as they go along.