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Brand development: How to keep sales material consistent

4th February 2020

Brand consistency is essential for the growth of any business. It distinguishes you from the competition and builds stronger emotional connections with your clients. It's crucial that your customer-facing teams reinforce this image whenever they can.

When sales reps are in a rush to close a deal, they risk sending out content that isn't up to date with your current branding. It may seem important to send the sales information out, regardless of visuals, but inconsistent messaging could reverse all the work they've done to warm up the lead.

Customers look for authenticity. When your branding deviates from what they expect, they can lose confidence in their purchasing decision.

Create guidelines to ensure consistency

Guidelines help to create a clear picture of your organisation's mission—and how your branding supports this. Get them in place first.

Your guidelines will cover things like logo positioning, colour schemes, fonts, and tone of voice. They should also emphasise the objectives you have for the corporate culture in your organisation and the values that have shaped it.

Define your process for sales asset creation

Understanding your sales team's process will help you create exactly the right kind of branded assets.

Your brand guidelines are a reference point for your sales team to ensure they're putting out content that's always on brand. If you work with your sales team from the beginning it'll be easier to build templates for each stage of the sales cycle—and for the various use cases too.

Templates make life much easier for sales teams. They can easily access the files from a digital asset management system (DAM) and complete tasks quickly. It's a foolproof way of making sure that logos, photos, and graphics are always relevant and on-brand.

Use a single platform for storing and sharing assets

A single platform for sharing assets offers lots of benefits, but it's particularly useful for maintaining brand consistency. A DAM system makes it easy to see how files are being used—and any brand updates can be rolled out automatically.

A single platform prevents multiple versions of files being stored in different parts of your organisation's network. So, the next time a salesperson is on the phone to a client and wants to emphasise your product's selling points with an up to date supporting document, they can, easily.

To create effective sales material you have to establish your brand guidelines first. From then on, you can explore how different asset management platforms can support your branding strategy.

To get you off to a good start, we've created The Complete Guide to Developing Your Brand Guidelines—you can download it here for free.