Since this is a sales piece, I asked the Marketing Director if I could interview a few of their salespeople. I wanted to ask two questions:

How do you pitch your service?
Are their any words you’d like to see included in the marketing messaging that would make your job easier?

I didn’t have any expectations for these interviews. But I learned a valuable lesson.

I helped to write the company’s external facing messaging. It was written to be direct and simple. Yet not one of the 3 sales people I interviewed used the appropriate verbiage. They all spoke of the primary benefit of the service in roughly the same way, but picked their own words to express its meaning.

I find that startling. It’s painful for marketing execs to distill a voluptous product or service into a bare-bones summary. What I did not realize is how hard it is to get an entire company to use that messaging consistently. I waltz in to a company, help them spin their words and waltz out. The real work begins when I leave.

I know that the Marketing Manager has been prepping the sales team, but there’s much work to do. Just another reminder that re-branding takes patience and constant repetition. Kinda like raising a toddler.