View this list as a buffet. You can choose a few things or load up your plates.

How Can You Tell if You Have “Message Alignment?”

Are you speaking with a consistent voice across your various customer touchpoints — website, sales presentations, marketing collateral, customer letters, FAQs for phone representatives, and your hiring process? I start with a simple online survey of your team, and I’ll share the results in a 30-minute no-obligation meeting before you ever pay me a penny.

What’s Your Unique Story?

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Your brand narrative needs to help customers, prospects, and your own employees understand how you help customers resolve their “real” problems. Is your team driving customers away because your website is difficult to navigate, your customer-service teams can’t answer their questions, or they had a bad experience with some part of our business that has nothing to do with marketing or sales.

I’ll build a story — a brand narrative — that positions your customer as the hero and you as their guide.

Once we create that brand narrative, we can discuss developing an integrated communications plan that could include:

• Updating your website to make it friction-free for existing customers and prospects.

• Developing proactive messaging (FAQs) on sensitive topics for your customer-facing teammates.

• Building a content plan that could include blog posts on your own site; guest posts on other people’s platforms; or videos that highlight your brand manifesto and your customers’ success as they use your product or service.

• Reviewing your customer letters (those computer-generated ones you haven’t thought about in years) to make sure they reflect your brand message.

• Creating a sales presentation template that will give your salespeople and account executives a framework that communicates your unique value proposition.

We can look at your social media, sales presentations, and marketing collateral. We’ll look at your website to see if it’s an extension of your brand story or a barrier to it. And at some point, I can look at customer correspondence like invoices, renewal notices, collection letters, credit authorizations. And I can look at the way you talk to job applicants and new hires, if you want.

The message may vary a bit by the audience, but if you get lots of different answers to the questions about the problem or problems you solve for customers and what makes you unique, then we need to talk.

Making Your Company (and You) a Thought Leader

Once you have a clear, compelling brand story/narrative, you can move on to helping customers, prospects and the general public view you as an expert and thought leader and become evangelists for your product or services.

I’m certified in the PESO content creation model, integrating Paid, Earned, Shared, and Owned media. Owned is the best place to start, followed by Earned (other people’s publications). But how I use that 2022 certification from Syracuse University and Spin Sucks is a great discussion for the first time we talk.

Regarding content creation, I have spent years writing for financial institutions, higher education, nonprofits, and tech companies on marketing, sales, compliance, credit underwriting, and endowments. I specialize in making science and technology more accessible to readers.

With many clients, we start with a documented content plan and deploy it through:

• Owned Media (Your Website and E-Mail). This includes internal presentations, memos, and town halls to keep everyone in the loop and reinforce core messages.

• Earned Media, where print and online publications publish your story. That can start with op-eds with a strong position or a press release highlighting a great story (supported by strong media talking points). It’s also about building relationships with busy reporters so they call you on deadline.

• Sales Pitches and Presentations

• Customer Communications that might include alumni engagement or newsletters.

Our Thought Leadership services include managing larger projects such as annual reports and strategic plans. I have lots of experience gathering teams from different areas and getting them to collaborate, even when they have different goals and priorities. You can see some examples here.

Oral Histories are another area that might interest you. My creation of the Baylor Line Foundation’s Oral Histories project had its roots in my father’s love for Syracuse University.

His love for the Orange was a major reason I attended Syracuse.  We’d watch football and basketball games by phone, and I’d regularly have to talk him off the ledge as he fretted about the final outcome.

And suddenly, he was gone. And I was left with memories of his love for the university.

Baylor University gave me the opportunity to help preserve the memories of wonderful teachers and successful alumni through video interviews. Here’s a link to the Friction-Free YouTube page with examples of the Oral Histories.

If I’ve piqued your interest, don’t wait. Some of the people we wanted to film passed away or became too ill to participate before we could get them on tape. In this emotional clip, Retired Baylor History Professor James Vardaman talks about how his sister (Ann Miller, another legendary Baylor professor) got him into Baylor as a probationary student, their differences in teaching styles, what he misses most about her, and then recites his favorite poem. Dr. Vardaman passed away shortly after we filmed this video.

These extended video interviews were an important way to remind alumni what they loved about Baylor at a very difficult time for the University. But these aren’t just for alumni associations. We’re talking to companies and nonprofits who are interested in filming founders, employees, and customers to bring their corporate values to life.

For universities and alumni associations, I can work with student filmmakers and help them get professional experience. And we’re working on ways to enable alumni and others to upload their own videos.

Trust me: You’ll wish you had them on film when they’re no longer with us.

Does your partner-management strategy make renewals a no-brainer?

Growing your business — or protecting your revenue — inevitably requires a partner management strategy that positions your company in the best light through sales presentations and Requests for Proposals.

It seems like only yesterday that MBNA America (at the time, the world’s leading issuer of affinity credit cards) was facing off with competitors for the endorsement of “partners” in marketing sectors that included Collegiate, Co-Brand, Sports, Professional Groups, and Special Interest (Non-Profits).

We had 5,000+ affinity and co-branded partners. Our account executives and salespeople each had their own style.  All too often, sales and renewals presentations focused on how wonderful MBNA was rather than on how we could resolve our partners’ problems.

We were positioning ourselves as the hero, rather than as the guide. We weren’t painting a picture of the journey ahead. Individual slides were jammed with bullets. There were few compelling images. We weren’t focusing on our partners’ struggles (profitability, brand awareness, customer/fan loyalty).

So we created a core presentation with sector-specific slides.  We limited each slide to one idea and created templates that would allow account executives to input program results that would be converted into compelling charts and graphs. We shared best practices (e.g., a high-performing University of Michigan mail solicitation) with other schools.

Sure, some AEs could paste in a logo and some numbers and hit Print. But we kept it flexible. I encouraged them to use their partners’ language and to include partner-specific images and colors in their sales and renewal presentations. We also bought the rights to high-resolution images.

I looked at more than 50 RFPs from partners and prospects and developed answers to the most common questions. I developed probing questions for AEs to ask the partner. We worked on ensuring our presentations integrated our brand story with words and colors that the partner recognized. 

I also developed a Relationship Planner that enabled AEs and their managers to talk about program structure, the partner organization, the cross-selling of products (where applicable), renewal preparation, and negotiation history. And we created a companywide spreadsheet of partner precedents that helped AEs see what others did when faced with unusual requests.

Let’s Check Out Your Customer Touchpoints

As I said at the beginning, these services are integrated. But I can help you identify breakdowns in your customer touchpoints and find ways to rebuild or streamline them. We can talk about how we can improve the customer (or prospective customer) experience — how they’ll know they belong with us and how we can help them feel like the hero of their story. We’ll talk about the most common questions that customers ask and make sure every employee knows how to answer and make it easier for customers to find the answer online if they don’t want to call.  And we’ll look at your website and see if it is clear in telling visitors what you do; how your product or service will improve their lives; and what they need to do to buy it.