Know your brand (pt. 3)  - The Nirvana

So just for a little bit of fun and to carry on from tips 1 and 2, how amazing would it be if you could build such a strong brand that not only could the vendor you are partnering with identify your business from your logo, but that logo would invoke emotional attachment and the vendor could connect with your company values and key skills.

Can you identify these brands? what emotions do they provoke?

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Know your brand (pt. 2) – the exercise – Ten questions to ask yourself

To follow on from my post (Partner Tip #1) try asking these questions of your business, it might help put things in perspective…

1. Can you state your five most relevant and compelling brand attributes (adjectives that describe your business)?
2. Have you identified and documented your short-term and long-term goals?
3. Do you know what those around you would say is your organisations greatest strength?
4. Are you clear about what you don’t do?
5. When people introduce you, what words do they use to describe what you do?
6. Can you clearly describe what differentiates you from your competitors?
7. Do you have a brand positioning statement that describes: what you offer, for whom and how you are different?
8. Can you clearly describe your target audience or the ‘sweetspot’ for your solution?
9. Do you have your own newsletter or ways to keep in touch with your vendors and target audience? 
10. Do you know the next step in the evolution of your brand (i.e. What you need to do next to increase your visibility among your target audience members)?

1. Know your brand

When working with a vendor it is important to understand what your company brand stands for. Think of the image that you wish to portrait within that organization and stick to it.

This isn’t a reference to the skills that your teams possess or services that you can provide, products that you sell or solutions that you build. This is more about how you present those skills and services, how you pitch the products you sell and how you reference the solutions that you have built.

What do you want people to say when asked about your business?

Some of the most successful Partners that I have worked with do an excellent job of expressing their brand to a vendor; quite often this is done without explaining it, but through the style of presentations that they give, through the way in which they interact with the vendor. In most cases this is exactly the same message that you would try to portrait to a customer to emphasize why they would choose your business to deliver a service. If you think about it, this makes perfect sense, as in most cases you want the vendor to be able to articulate your uniqueness or differentiators to their customers.

Be proud of your company culture; it is a representation of the people you employ, and lets face it, they are the heartbeat of your business and the most important asset you possess. It’s a well known fact that people buy from people, so be proud of yours.

Google have announced ‘single sign on’ support for a number of their web applications. Happy days. this really improves the overall experience of their product set and will even let you manage more than one mail account without the need to sign out then in again. Impressive.

Prompted me to research into when Microsoft realised this feature was important to the success of web based applications… can't quite believe it's been 10 years...