Most important in complex B2B sales: Branding or Salesman?
Branding in B2C or B2B sales
In Business to Consumer product branding is utmost important as people have a wide choice of products in the shopping mall or the large department store. The branding helps to decide because of the trust that has been build and the name recognition.
In Business-to-Business sales the corporate branding has influence for regular or frequently bought products as the brand name stands for quality and service level.
Corporate branding has even more importance if it concerns catalog products as the brand name will let the products stand out. People will choose a familiar name from a catalog or online.
Branding in Complex B2B sales?
However for the complex B2B sales, product branding exists rarely and corporate branding is only feasible for the very large players: like IBM, HP, SUN Systems, Citrix, Cisco, Symantec.
Small companies don’t stand a chance to get any recognition even if they spend a relatively large budget on corporate branding.
In complex B2B sales product branding is very difficult as the products are rather unique and sold in limited quantities. Some large international corporations are capable of branding their products effectively: IBM Tivoli, Microsoft Office, Blackberry (RIM), Boeing 747.
And in many cases the company name is also the product name: Salesforce.com, SAP S/3.
This corporate branding will give the Sales teams support during their sales cycle by the trust it has build over the years of branding.
Importance salesman skills
Still in the complex sales, the proposed solution and the skills of the salesman (and his sales team) are more important.
The prospect needs to become convinced the salesman provide the best solution and the best opportunity for the company.
The salesman plays an important role in the buying process and the final decision. The better he has listened and defined the problem, the more likely he has proposed the best suited solution.
In the end at the moment of the decision, all the advertising, trade show sponsoring or conference pitches have lesser impact compared to the skills and the relationship build by the salesman and his sales team.
The branding helps in B2B Complex Sales, especially in order to get selected onto the vendor list. However it has less importance and influence once the buying process has started.
The Sales team or Salesman are then the most important and of course the quality and/or benefits of the solutions.
Does your company have a strong branding or do you have to make the difference?
