Your most influential target audience is your staff.
This is a painting called ‘Confusion’, and it’s definitely how the inside of my head looks when I myself am not sure what’s going on.
A couple of years ago I was working with a smallish-but-getting-bigger-fast B2B company, and our marketing efforts seemed to be fairly successful: We were getting buzz in the marketplace, having little trouble getting meetings because potential clients had always “heard good things” about us, winning new business over larger, more established competitors – by most indices, our marketing efforts were delivering results.
But revenue growth just wasn’t following the same trajectory. Sure, it was growing – but not as steeply as our brand awareness and equity seemed to be. And we weren’t sure why.
Then I sat in on an all-staff meeting, and I began to understand.
When the company was smaller, senior leadership (all of whom were highly entrepreneurial) was very involved with every client engagement. They were handling much of the day-to-day interaction, which meant they could build relationships, listen for opportunities, ask for referrals, sell additional services – all the revenue drivers that make an investment in marketing worthwhile in the long-term.
As the company had grown, however, a lot of the account management had been handed off to newer, more junior employees. When I sat in on the staff meeting, I could see that while the newbies were hard-working and anxious to do a good job, most of them weren’t nearly as enthusiastic about the organization as the senior leadership, and in many cases didn’t even really have a good grasp of everything the company sold, how it could help clients, and why it was so great.
In other words, they weren’t familiar with the brand story, the positioning, or the value proposition.
Stop thinking about training your people. Start thinking about marketing to them.
Now, some people would say that this was a job for Sales Training. I tend to disagree – mostly because ‘Sales Training’ is something that seems to be reserved for ‘Sales People‘, and I’m of the opinion that every single person in the organization, from admin assistants to account managers to the accounts payable people, can (and should) be sales influencers. They can spot opportunities, influence decision-makers, increase brand awareness, build relationships – all of the things that drive long-term revenue growth.
Try to give them ‘sales training’, and they’ll tune out or privately decide that it’s ‘not their job’, since they aren’t in sales. Market to them, on the other hand, and they can become passionate evangelists who are invested in telling (and living) the brand story.
What does internal marketing look like?
Well, it looks a lot like your external marketing – just using different channels.
Some ways to start marketing to employees:
- Include a session with the Marketing Director as part of your onboarding efforts for new hires – I know you probably make fun of your marketing people for being so bloody enthusiastic all the time, but they can be infectious
- Make sure all employees have reviewed your marketing materials and know exactly what you sell, why it’s different and better, and why it’s so successful in the marketplace
- Deliver the same great experiences to employees that you deliver to your customers. Do you send flowers or gift baskets to new clients? Great – send them to new employees or on employee anniversaries, too.
- You know that e-newsletter you send to clients to tell them about all the neat stuff you’re doing? Make sure you’re sending the same info to your employees – before you send it out externally. It’s amazing how well people respond to feeling like they’re ‘in the know’ ahead of everyone else
- Have all staff – especially juniors and newbies – spend time with members of the senior leadership team, the same way you bring in the C-suites to help sell a new client. Employees will feel respected and valuable, which encourages engagement, and they’ll absorb some of the entrepreneurial enthusiasm that your senior people are projecting
- You wouldn’t hand a potential client a giant binder of single-spaced text and tell them to read it and call you if they want to buy something – don’t do it to employees (via an Employee Handbook), either. Review information with them, point out the interesting bits, and encourage them to ask questions
- It takes 4-7+ touchpoints for a potential customer to really understand what you do and make a purchase, and it takes a long-term relationship to drive repeat business. It’s the same with employees: Don’t assume that a week’s worth of ‘onboarding’ is all it takes for them to become experts in your business or passionate brand storytellers.
I know this has a lot of overlap with what HR would call ‘training’. But when you think of it as informing, persuading and wooing your employees the same way you do your customers, you’ll get the increased emotional investment that does a better job of driving long-term sales growth.