Your Brand Is Sinking Without These Three Points of Contact

The news cycle is exceptionally choppy right now. Brands need to make critical decisions on where they stand and the course ahead. And if they don’t take a stand and choose where they’re headed, how long can they stay up and stay above the waters?

When boating, or doing other things where a fall can be dangerous, there’s something called the three points of contact rule. The idea is your body should have at least three points of contact with something stable at all times.

Anything less than that and a wave can come along and throw you.

That’s how marketing should be done right now.

Sales

One of those points of contact is almost always going to be the deck of the boat. At least one of your feet is going to be planted there. In marketing or public relations that should be sales. Even if you’re a non-profit, it’s going to be where the money comes from. You can have points of contact elsewhere, but if revenue or sponsorship is not coming from somewhere, you don’t have a going concern.

While that seems obvious, many marketing and most public relations teams don’t do this. Sales people can be a pain in the rear end. If they win business, they can say it was because of their efforts and marketing and sales didn’t really help. When sales aren’t coming in, well marketing isn’t doing its job and what in the world is public relations doing apart from absorbing budget?

And the concreteness of sales’ metrics… either money is coming into the bank account or not, is scary if you don’t have a direct role in bringing in those dollars, but are rather supporting it indirectly. Too frequently marketing and public relations functions then try to set up metrics that they can control, and are at a safe distance from sales. Moving leads and prospects through a marketing funnel, impressions, clicks, etc. And there’s correlation between that and sales, but it sure is tenuous.

Sales are sales are sales. And if you don’t have at least one of your points of contact on the deck of the boat formed by sales, it really doesn’t matter where the other points of contact are.

Integration

Beyond sales, the other points of contact can be any number of things that work for sales. It could be media relations, social media, email campaigns, collateral, your site, etc. But whatever it is it had better be connected to sales. And if you’re moving you’d better through a changing market and media environment, make sure those other points of contact are also connected to each other in addition to sales.

This seems obvious, but if you have a newsletter, how many of its articles have been selected or written with prospects in your funnel in mind? Does your sales team know when the newsletter is going out and has it been written in a fashion where it organically can be forwarded to leads and prospects?

Can a sales person send a message saying, “hey you know how we talked about Hackernoon the other day and how great it is as a resource? Here’s an article I found there that’s useful to marketers and public relations professionals and shows how brands should pay attention to places like Hackernoon to understand how they can become more proficient in today’s crazy environment.”

Why now?

And let’s come back to today’s crazy environment. Before Donald Trump's inauguration, what society seemed to respect in a brand, and what society expects now is in volatile flux.

What’s the constant message and brand running through those three points of contact?

Here's three constants we heard from Dominic-Madori Davis of TechCrunch and Alyse Killeen of Stillmark as they were interviewed by Meredith Beuchaw and Ed Zimmerman of Lowenstein Sandler LLP at VentureCrush recently:

1. Your personal story and choices you've made anchor brand and the sale
2. Your primary, consistent, and differentiated value prop through those choices sharpens brand and backs the sale
3. Non-textual signals amplify brand and facilitate the sale

In times like these, you are what you have chosen to do. And what you choose now will be what your brand is tomorrow and beyond.

Davis said a personal story is part of what draws something to her journalistic attention. She also looks for stories she and readers would not have found on their own.

Davis also went on to say today a journalist has a brand that transcends the news brand they work for. For her personal story, she shared how her professional journey started with screenwriting at University of Southern California. She was pulled into copy editing her student paper. The Varsity Blues scandals put a news spotlight on the campus (Melissa Korn's journalism is also great here for context).

Does her initial choice of screenwriting tell us something about her investment in personal stories and having the space to explore the unexpected?

Killeen shared the influence of working for her grandfather, and hearing people talk about the respect they had for his integrity, the choices he made.

At Stillmark she said she focuses their brand on a primary value proposition. And she pointed out that in working with startup founders, what they think and want their primary value proposition to be, may change when they see why customers are coming to them.

Davis highlighted how fashion choices, are an example of showing differentiation and a brand, rather than telling. You can watch the full panel here:

Bringing together brand and sales

Here’s the thing, sales ensure you are a going concern. Brand ensures your going concern will endure based on the memory of the choices you’ve made in the course of winning sales.

If your sales don’t have integrity, if you sacrifice integrity for sales, the dollars are good now, but they’ll be cheaper later as your brand declines.

For those three points of contact, make sure the point of contact you have with sales, is anchored in the right kind of sales, for the right reasons, backed with the kind of demonstrated integrity that will sustain your business and grow it dependably.