Your Customer Doesn’t Care About Your Org Chart

Your company may be complicated. You may have different divisions, multiple service lines or several locations. Maybe you’ve acquired another company or added new capabilities over the years. Internally, there are probably very good reasons for how everything is organized.

But your customer doesn’t care about any of that.

They don’t want to figure out which division does what or understand how your departments work together. They just want to understand who you are and what you can do for them.

The problem is that your internal dialogue impacts your clients and prospects. If not managed, it can confuse their understanding of what you do, and lead to a siloed perspective of all you can offer.

When the inside starts showing on the outside

We worked with a professional services company that summed up the problem perfectly in our very first conversation: “We have two sides to our business, and they both describe what we do differently.”

This isn’t unusual. People tend to talk about the part of the business they know best, which means they’re often talking about their job rather than the company as a whole. You can quickly test this by asking five people in your organization to give a 30-second elevator pitch. You will likely hear five different stories.

That’s where a strong brand platform and messaging strategy can really help.

A brand platform gives everyone a shared foundation for talking about the company. It defines who you are, what you stand for, what makes you different and why your audiences should care. Messaging builds from there, helping different teams talk about what they do while still connecting back to the bigger company story.

For that professional services company, we included an elevator speech in the platform so they could all explain the business consistently. They implemented it across the organization, and now everyone is telling the same company story, even when they’re talking about different parts of the business.

Growth makes this even more important

The bigger a company gets, the easier it is for this to happen. You add services, bring in new people, make an acquisition or start working with different marketing partners. Each addition makes the business a little more complex.

Your customers aren’t looking at your org chart. They’re looking at your website, talking to your salespeople, reading your emails, and working with your team. All those things shape how they see your company.

Your company can be complicated on the inside. Just don’t make your customers feel it.