For professional and financial services firms, success depends so much on presentations and the pitch. Teams on the front line are responsible for delivering the business through the impact of their words and emotional engagement with clients. Individual’s skills vary and each presenter has to play to their strengths, but do the corporate messages get lost in the process and are audiences left with a clear understanding of the most important takeaways?

Defining key messages at a corporate and product level and ensuring they are understood and shared throughout the organisation will not only ensure consistency, but will have a direct affect on your lead generation and sales team’s win ratio.

Opportunities to get direct and truthful qualitative feedback from potential clients on the quality of pitches are rare. In our experience of researching audiences for lost and won pitches, it is in most instances a lack of clarity in explaining complex ideas and processes and a tendency to focus on what the teller is interested in rather than the audience that results in pitch failure. Presenting is all about building trust, at both a personal and corporate level and this requires a natural flow, focus on the audience and an understanding of their needs. In order to seal the deal, the sales team needs to ensure that the takeaways of the pitch are the main messages you want to make. The challenge is to pin point the key messages that convey exactly how you differentiate yourself from competitors and the value you bring to the market. Whilst these things may seem obvious, we’ve found that many organisations struggle in getting the story right and telling it in a way that is compelling and memorable.

Converting leads into business is easier when people are already familiar with you and your offer. A lot of trust has to be built to take potential clients from a cold sales lead to selecting your services and consistency in messaging at every touch point along the journey is an important element in building that trust. Prospects are very likely to waver when they find promises made by the first sales contact are contradicted by someone at a later stage. A small percentage improvement in conversions at each stage of the sales process adds up to a significant improvement in the ultimate number of pitches won.

While crafting messages and improving the sales teams’ ability to deliver them is just one element in building the trust demonstrated in our graph, there’s a great value in perfecting every aspect of your pitch team’s approach. Messages serve as a backbone to all forms of communication and a strong set of messages work as a marketing and selling engine, fuelling and maximising lead generation.

We’re very sorry today to hear of the death at the age of 56 of Eddie Stobart, someone who built the UK’s greatest trucking brand.  Branding is so often misunderstood, yet some people are simply born with the branding gene – an intuitive understanding of what it’s all about without having to lift a textbook and Eddie was one such natural who deserves a place in the branding hall of fame.

If you’re unfamiliar with name Eddie Stobart, I’d guess you don’t spend a lot of time driving the UK’s motorways, because you’ll seldom find yourself on our great north – south trunk roads without one of their lorries in view.

Eddie inherited his father’s small Cumbrian fertiliser delivery business when only a teenager and built one of the largest UK haulage businesses, now with 2,250 trucks. There are few haulage companies the average person could name but if there’s one it would be Eddie’s with its 25,000 strong fan club, Corgi model, numerous facebook pages and even a Wurzel song tribute.

Great brands have great stories and Stobart’s really caught the public imagination with tales that spread by word of mouth about the lorries having girls’ names and being the cleanest on the road, not to mention the drivers wearing collar and tie. But stories alone don’t build brands, they have to be saying something significant to the target market that is also supported in reality.  Eddie saw an industry where things could be done much better and he built a business that delivered it. The stories and marketing were great promotion but would have been empty promises if not representative of what the business delivered in reality.

As a service industry, haulage depends on the people and the tributes from Eddie Stobart workers today show that loyalty was as strong on the inside as the outside. A singular vision, a clear strategy shared by all internally and communicated clearly to the wider world – corporate branding at its best.

Internal Communications – HR 2.0?

Over the last few years, new opportunities have arisen for HR teams to leverage social media and Web 2.0 in internal branding. Social media is now being used extensively through corporate platforms to unify, establish collaboration, create innovation and even to establish corporate standards across large multinational corporations. While the uptake of social media is most apparent in the US, adoption by global companies is increasing awareness within Europe. Rapid technological development is also bringing social software tools within the reach of smaller businesses.

In a survey of 20,000 HR professionals, Birkman International found that many people working in HR are fully aware of the potential of social media technologies, such as blogs, social networks, social bookmarking, wikis, content syndication, mobile computing and online video (83%). However, opportunities exist to improve their knowledge and experience and turn awareness into effective usage.

When asked which Web 2.0 technologies they use more than once a month, the clear leaders were LinkedIn (75%) and Facebook (66%). More surprisingly, almost half (45%) are also using Google Reader and 28% use Twitter. Using social media for recruitment purposes is the obvious starting point for web thirsty HR professionals and LinkedIn, Twitter and videos distributed through platforms such as YouTube are the most popular platforms for this.

Best practice for social media requires a clear distinction to be made between internal and external communications. For external communication HR teams need to work closely with marketing teams to contribute to building a strong, branded community that brings consistency of brand experience from recruitment to customer support. While businesses tend to have clear distinctions between departments, audiences are oblivious to such lines of demarcation and will wander freely through the information available through online channels.

The first requirement for internal social networking is a social media policy to give employees clear instructions about what is acceptable and what isn’t in their use of social media. The next requirement is to set objectives and to develop a content strategy that makes the best use of each of the available media to ensure your communication brings a rich user experience. Video is an important component internally as well as externally, whether it is to improve internal understanding of your brand by demonstrating values in action, or by using video to bring a closeness to communication across distant locations or from senior personnel.  Blog content can also be valuable to bring access to leaders within the business to develop better managers and nurture best practices.

Above all, web 2.0 is about collaboration and two-way conversations. This is where concerns about privacy often inhibit participation and companies can miss out on the benefits of social media. However, with an internal online infrastructure, managed or closed to external participation, companies can enjoy the benefits of social media without the downside. The HR team can encourage managers and employees to get involved and send as well as receive tailored messages building closer ties across the organisation. It’s also a great way to deliver various types of e-learning to the employee’s desktop.

For a bit of inspiration, here are a few examples of companies who have developed internal social media platforms:

1) IBM has created a social media platform called Beehive. The team created the site in order to help IBM employees to meet the challenge of building the relationships that are vital to working in large, dispersed enterprises today. They’re also exploring whether Beehive can help discover people with common interests or the right skills for a particular project. Incorporating functionality people are familiar with on Facebook, such as a profile page and photo uploads, Beehive allows employees to schedule events and write commentaries in a private, closed environment.

2) Pixar, the Acadamy Award-winning animation studio, has a video wiki for animation collaboration. The company started with text based sharing and then moved to video-based wikis to share information about films in production and to document meeting notes. Once the system was installed, they found it led to increased efficiency and faster film development.

3) Leading IT company, EMC, has an internal social platform called Global/One. Their goal was to create a platform for building relationships on a one-to-one level amongst staff and the corporation with virtually zero-budget toward branding. Over the last three years it has become the driving force behind a cultural shift in a collaborative environment that is spurring innovation, global collaboration and solutions that solve client’s problems. It has created social media “rock stars” within the company who are becoming recognized leaders for their blog writings as the go-to opinion leaders who people respect and follow for their thoughtful ideas and inspiration.

Banks are facing a huge challenge to improve their image in consumers’ minds. As human behaviour evolves and more and more customers use digital media to communicate, the need for financial service sector companies to join the online conversation grows. Even though the use of social media networks in business is still a new concept and has its own challenges, some financial service sector companies have already realised the importance of it and are successfully using the technology. The lesson to be learnt is a simple one: Listen to what your customers have to say, engage them in conversation on their terms and learn from the views they express.

We’ve looked at how First Direct implemented its 2009 Social Media Campaign.

First Direct Live – Tell us what you’re thinking…

“I think it’s extraordinary that you don’t offer online banking for Apple Mac users. Nor an iPhone application for online banking. You’re excluding a large sector of highly paid people from your bank” (19.11.09 9.08am).

This comment was made by a First Direct customer and posted on the First Direct Live website for all to see. It is part of the ongoing Social Media Campaign, which was launched in March 2009. In a brave attempt to capture what their customers thought about them, First Direct invited feedback from consumers about the brand and gathered and analysed sentiment from various social media sites. The results are featured on their website in real time.

The website (http://www.live.firstdirect.com) features three widgets. The first one shows the comments, which are left directly on the site by users. The second features “live feelings” retrieved from around the web and updates on an hourly basis, whereas the third widget displays single words gathered from social media sites.

The campaign reinforces the idea that First Direct is open, honest and transparent. Some of the comments and sentiments made by customers on the site are not positive. However, First Direct recognise that these conversations are happening online anyway. By embracing this and publishing the results on the official website, First Direct has achieved a degree of control over the conversation. More importantly, they’ve gained trust by trusting others. The comment above clearly demonstrates that listening to your customers and engaging with them results in valuable insight, that can be leveraged to achieve positive brand change.

“Online comments are part of life now and it is better to embrace it” (Lisa Wood, Head of Marketing).

Admittedly, first direct has always been a digital organisation and was popular with their customers to begin with. The risk of featuring live comments and sentiments was therefore not as high as it may be for other less popular brands. However, there is a lot to be learnt from this leading example. The key is to find out where the conversation about you is happening, join it, learn from it and share it.