In organizations just like yours, there are a variety of personnel, and each of them –– for better or worse –– is your brand evangelist. And each employee has the same potential to be a star for your brand.  I’m Mark Stephen Ware. The new movie, “A Star Is Born,” staring Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper, is not the first time this story has been put to film. It’s not the second time. It’s not even the third time. It’s the fourth time because it’s a great story. The players change, but the story is essentially the same and audiences eat it up. That’s how brand building should work too. Everyone has the chance to be “born a star” for your brand, and that depends on how well they care for the brand and deliver services to your clients. Even with employee turn over or “churn”, the potential to rise to stardom is the same: from sales and sales enablement teams to finance and HR teams, from operations to reception, everyone can be a star for your company. The key is to plan on it, bake into your employee onboarding processes and make it part of your culture’s top 3 “gotta haves”, while continually modeled by your leaders. And that will make a hit with your customers causing them to buy repeat tickets to your firm’s star “performance”. I’m Mark Stephen Ware.

Some people really struggle with change. That struggle, in part, can be due to too many options and a lack of data to make an informed decision.  "Doing the right thing is more important than doing the thing right,” said the renowned management guru Peter Drucker Apple, Chick-Fil-A, FedEx and Southwest Airlines are examples of brands that have evolved, but managed to stay true to their calling and ultimately grew record revenue.  Their long-term success is an example we should all follow, but what was it that enabled them to be so successful? How they managed change. That’s the challenge in managing brand. Remember when Levi's decided to go into the high-end men's suites space? Or when Hooters launched its own airline? Both of these experiments met with flat success and soon collapsed. Levi and Hooters seemingly forgot about what made them successful in the first place: that unique double-helix brand DNA strand that no one else had.  Companies like Southwest and FedEx grew their brand’s by staying close to their core values and the framework that made the brand successful in the beginning. For Apple that meant changing the world one person at a time and enabling them to be more productive with technology but not for the sake of technology. For Chick-Fil-A it meant evolving its menu but never losing sight of its core commitment to fast-food restaurant cleanliness, nice bathrooms and tremendous customer care and customer service.  For long-term success, do innovate, do progress, do evolve, but don’t forget about the values, the framework –– that special DNA of your brand –– that has allowed your company to enjoy its success. Show off that DNA, cite it, embrace it, esteem it. Make sure all newbies know about it and that the veteran staff never forget it. Peter Drucker might say that's doing the right thing to enable your brand for long-term success.

Sometimes it’s just time to sunset the brand. And in those cases, it’s the best call to make. And other times, it may be best to just update the brand and drive it into the future. These are the times when brands need to be rejuvenated, updated, and aligned due to new strategic directions of the company, or customer perceptions about the firm. Recent examples would include Apple Computer becoming Apple, or Dunkin Donuts becoming Dunkin. The classic case of a great move was when Federal Express became FedEx, by popular demand as well as United Parcel Service becoming UPS. Other brands take aggressive action and do so out of necessity such as when Arthur Andersen became Accenture. By simplifying and focusing the brand (logo and/or name), two great things can occur: one, the market perceives a change is coming that will benefit them. Perhaps more choices, broader menus, better options. The second great thing is simply that the fresh PR and buzz will get people thinking and talking more about the brand. And that’s always a good thing.

The #1 best way for sales enablement and marketing leaders to score points with the senior team is to speak the CEO’s love language. A recent Deloitte study reported in the Wall Street Journal encouraged marketers and sales enablement leaders to establish and embrace business metric in order to gain a more solid footing with senior leadership. This idea of using traditional sales enablement programs’ analytics and those of marketing campaigns, for example, just won’t cut it any more. The best advice to these leaders is to learn to speak the CEO’s love language and that means talking about how your activities are directly impacting revenue growth (not just gains), how you are helping to improve employee team morale and how you are helping to lock-in long-term client loyalty.

When it comes to talking sales enablement or marketing with the CEO, it’s a mixed bag. Some CEOs are super savvy when it comes to lead gen, bid production, social platforms, PR, media buy and publishing. They get it. Other CEOs understand parts and pieces; they all have varying degrees of interest, and of skepticism. So, the sales and marketing leadership has to always be ready to speak the language of the CEO. CEO’s typically will want to focus on three things: revenue growth, improving employee morale and enhancing long-term customer loyalty. That means it is vital that sales enablement and marketing leaders adopt the vocabulary of the CEO, and that begins with understanding the CEO’s top priorities, and then looking at the meaningful activities that will showcase alignment –– and results. That way, when the CEO asks for an update, the response will always be guaranteed to hit the CEO’s sweet spot and priorities. I’d say it is always best to ensure your activities are aligned with the CEO’s top priorities and then have a “star story” (beginning with results) that can be easily and obviously be traced back to sales and marketing’s impact on those priorities. That’s a win-win-win sure to make the CEO grin.

One of the most overlooked areas of Sales Enablement and Brand Management is revenue leakage. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Stop the leakage and save your brand from getting damaged. As business leaders, we instinctively look at revenue results, costs, margins and the drivers behind each. We may look at employee churn and even CSAT or VOC scores, but other than perhaps the CFO, who’s really looking at revenue leakage? Sales Enablement can put into practice a great process for the sales teams and create a strong supporting infrastructure to go with it. But unless someone is regularly scoring client churn, associated costs and rationale, revenue will continue to leak. Wouldn’t it be better if the business consistently kept its clients long term and stopped the leakage? Begin by examining why clients are leaving and then assign a senior owner to stop the leakage in partnership with the leadership team. Your brand, sales team and CFO will thank you.

All organizations will be challenged by the unexpected. In today’s social-hungry media culture, it won’t stay a secret for long. Better to have a pre-planned action plan and communication response plan and stick to it. Last year, Forbes listed the Biggest PR Crises of 2017 –– from Adidas and Pepsi to FoxNews and United Airlines. Now is the time to identify ten to twenty potential scenarios that are possible, however unlikely, to affect your organization and develop a crisis playbook. Without a crisis playbook already in place, chances are your organization will panic, misstep and emotionally respond (or not at all), and that can impact the brand’s good faith, leadership team’s credibility, company valuation, client perceptions, staffing and team morale, to name a few. Make it a goal to have in place your organization’s crisis playbook before the end of the year and then, when something happens, stick to the script.

Many marketers rightly focus on analytics. But failure to immediately move the analytics needle isn’t in itself an admission of marketing’s failure. It just takes time. I don’t know about you, but my experience with marketing tells me that very little happens over night. Or over a week. Or over a month in some cases. Even the best GTM strategy, product offering and compelling narrative doesn’t guarantee immediate short-term results. When setting expectations around analytics (a common KPI component), it’s always a good idea to start with something like the Three Wheres: where we were, where we are and where we’re headed.

There is tremendous value in market research. But that value is premised on the idea that the audience is correctly identified and approached. There are many types of market research –– about competitors, the ideal prospect, current customers and of course industry trends. And it’s super easy and fast to push out a, for example, SurveyMonkey questionnaire. But I’ve found the best data comes from brief live 1:1 interviews. If the goal is to understand more complex scenarios — for example, why clients are leaving, you have to go deeper and go live 1:1 either via phone or in person. Questioning should use a good mixture of both qualitative and qualitative and incorporate a rationale component to each question. It’s just not as useful to have the answer “Yes” or “No”; responses with supporting rationale help explain the response and help marketers to leverage it in a meaningful way. When planning your next market research project, get the illusive “why” with each response.

Sometimes marketing is a compromise. That’s okay— marketing needs good feedback from the team and trusted third-parties, but the responsibility for marketing is with the marketing team to ensure messaging is clear, simple and appropriately compelling to motivate the target audience and drive sales. It’s easy for some parts of the organization to dismiss marketing as the “graphics people” who spiff up PowerPoints, post things on social and organize events. Marketing also partners with sales for targeting strategic accounts, fully-impactful collateral and associated analytics. Don’t let anyone tell you marketing is just a cost center. Marketing is the best sales enablement and sales driving part of the organization outside of sales itself. Done well, marketing produces great collateral, elevates the brand to new heights, produces award-winning events, white papers and generates highly sought-out vetted and warm sales leads.