Who Owns the Voice of Your Company: Your Company or Your Sales Team?
4 min read
Great sales teams carry growth targets. They understand your company's capabilities and your clients' challenges in equal measure. By bridging the two sides, they make every pitch feel customized to every buyer and building loyalty along the way. It's a well-oiled machine, but this loyalty to a salesperson is also fragile.
A study published in the Journal of Marketing Research points out that, while both loyalty to a salesperson and loyalty to the company can increase a buyer's willingness to pay a premium, only company loyalty anchors that value to your business when the salesperson leaves. Which means if your top salesperson departs, your client relationship might walk out the door with them.
So building up company loyalty with your customers is important to maintain a relationship with them but there is another beneficial effect: A study from the Journal of Marketing found that fluctuation in sales teams can actually improve sales performance by 29%. The deciding factor wasn't just a smooth handover — it was how strongly the customer was tied to the company itself, rather than just the person who took their calls.
Is your company telling the same story as your sales team?
Today, the sales journey is more like an ecosystem than a traditional funnel. It's less likely that it will move in a straight line as it once did, because there are so many distinct entry points for a potential client. Even a cold call is now part of a much larger web that also includes your website, newsletter, social media, digital ads, and organic search. The ultimate goal with any of these touchpoints isn't just to grab the client's attention, but to maintain a clear throughline across all of them. All paths ultimately lead to sales.
But when that throughline breaks, the entire ecosystem falls apart. If your website and LinkedIn are focused on different messaging and priorities, buyers get lost and lose trust. Ironically, the problem isn't a lack of good information: In a 2019 survey, Gartner found that 89% of B2B buyers actually rated the materials they encountered as high quality. The friction comes when a buyer is overwhelmed by too many high-quality touchpoints telling them completely different things. When buyers have to sort through too much information and untangle conflicting messaging, they're 153% more likely to settle for a smaller, safer purchase than originally planned.
A slower, but similar, disconnect happens when a company outgrows its own brand. You shift upmarket and expand your capabilities, but your website goes right on describing the business you used to be. New prospects see an outdated version of your business, and existing customers never realize the newly-expanded scope of what you can do. Instead of paving the way for your sales team, your brand becomes something they have to constantly sell against.
The common instinct is to fix this through training: Drill the sales team on messaging until they're fluent in your brand voice, ensuring that whoever calls will get the most up-to-date version of the company. But your salespeople aren't the only touchpoint a buyer has with your company. When the call ends, your brand has to carry the narrative forward on its own.
Transforming from a company to a brand that speaks for itself
If your brand can't carry its own narrative, then your business remains dependent on the individuals who can. And tethering your revenue and growth to a handful of employees means your business is effectively renting its revenue. To truly own that revenue, you have to start by owning your brand voice.
When businesses start thinking about branding, the conversation usually defaults to the logo, the typeface, or the color palette. The voice is routinely overlooked — which is odd given how conversational the actual B2B sales cycle is.
In his foundational book on corporate communication, Joep Cornelissen emphasizes that an organization's identity must be treated as a central, strategic management discipline. Trust is built when the company's internal identity aligns seamlessly with its external image. Your sales department is undeniably key to your success, but they can't be the ones to lead on voice just because they're the most public-facing part of your team.
As leadership, your task is to articulate exactly what your company stands for and integrate that voice into your broader strategic planning. Yes, the tone might flex slightly depending on whether the person speaking is a saleswoman delivering a pitch or a customer service manager resolving a client issue, but the underlying core remains the same. Above all, it has to be systematized: a language specific enough that a new hire can become fluent in a week, rather than passively absorbing it from whoever sits next to them over the next six months.
That may sound like a lot to juggle, but the start of the process is surprisingly easy. Try these two initial exercises: First, read your homepage as though you were a first-time visitor who has never heard of your company. Go over your LinkedIn page and your sales deck, and ask two of your salespeople to pitch you (separately). Do they all tell the same story? Where does the messaging diverge?
Next, imagine you're out for coffee with a prospect and they ask you directly: What are three things that make your company different? Write those three things down, and then go back through your material to see if (and where) they're mentioned.
If your touchpoints are telling a consistent story and you find those three distinguishing traits in your materials, you're in better shape than most of your market. If you don't, you have a clear map of what you need to fix.