Some businesses focus on sales to achieve their success, while others focus on brand building to achieve their goals. “How you sell matters. What your process is matters. But how your customers feel when they engage with you matters more.” - Tiffani Bova (Global Customer Growth and Innovation at Salesforce) In my mind building a brand is a long-term commitment to growing connections with your customers, while sales is the short term play that gives the customer what they want or need. Some of us are averse to sales as we don’t want to appear pushy, desperate and be labelled as ‘sales-y’, especially in at a time where we’re over being ‘sold to’. While others who could sell ice to an eskimo may struggle with the concept of building a memorable identity that represents their business, without the expectation of a sale. So we build our business on the strengths we have and personally I’m more of a brand focused operator…Total shocker I know 😆 as I was hopeless at selling Apple computers back in the day, which at the time, were such an easy sell. Though this isn’t all to say that you can’t focus on and implement both at the same time. Given that you can build brand equity over time, those long-tail results shouldn’t hurt sales, but rather improve them over time if implemented well. Similarly if sales perform well in the short-term, then your brand awareness goes up and you have more resources to invest in growing your brand presence. Without a brand to relate to, a customer has nothing to engage with and trust what you have to sell. Without sales, your brand doesn’t exist. But, if you’re focusing too much on one and not the other, well, that business might not have legs into the future. Which could you do better at? Sales or Brand?
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