How to Convert B2B Buyers Without Convincing Them | Kate Dileo

Kate Dileo introduces the 'Brand Trifecta,' a tactical framework designed to shift B2B messaging from merely convincing prospects to actively converting them. She emphasizes that an effective brand clearly answers what a company does, the heart-pain it solves, and how it differs from the competition within the first 15 seconds of an interaction. By mastering this sequence, companies trigger a psychological comparison moment that prompts buyers to ask how they can buy. The conversation explores the necessary balance between organizational and personal brands, highlighting that founder-led content should always tie back to the corporate value proposition. Dileo stresses that an organization must first codify its overarching message—nailing the tagline, value proposition, and differentiators—before encouraging executives and employees to build their own thought leadership. This creates a cohesive narrative that protects the company even if key employees leave. Finally, the episode highlights the importance of defining an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) based on deep emotional pain points while maintaining a singular, consistent tone of voice. By ignoring competitor gimmicks and unapologetically owning their true identity, businesses stand out in crowded markets. Ultimately, a brand is not an aspirational vision statement; it is a relational, practical tool that creates the path of least resistance to revenue.

Discussed in this episode

• Why your brand's primary job is to convert ready buyers rather than constantly trying to convince skeptics.
• The importance of establishing a codified organizational brand before encouraging employee personal brands.
• How to define your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) based on the bottom-line heart pain of your specific buyers.
• The three psychological elements humans need to hear to self-select and make a B2B purchasing decision.
• Crafting a practical B2B tagline that accurately answers 'what you do' in five to six words.
• Expanding your tagline into a value proposition that addresses the buyer's current reality and pain.
• Using three to five quick differentiator statements to trigger a buyer's psychological comparison moment.
• Protecting your brand's clarity and tone of voice during scaling by demanding continuous sales and marketing alignment.

Episode highlights

1. 0:00 — Introduction to converting vs. convincing
2. 2:15 — Defining brand as the path to revenue
3. 4:30 — Hierarchy of organizational vs. personal branding
4. 7:45 — Who should be the face of a scaling company
5. 10:30 — Preventing brand damage when employees go rogue
6. 13:00 — Defining your ICP based on deep pain
7. 16:15 — Kate's IT cold-calling origin story
8. 19:40 — Breaking down the Brand Trifecta components
9. 24:00 — Why differentiators trigger buying questions
10. 28:15 — Maintaining clarity and tone as you scale
11. 31:50 — Ignoring competitor gimmicks to own your identity
12. 34:20 — Rapid fire questions and closing thoughts

Key takeaways

• Shift your messaging mindset from convincing prospects to effortlessly converting them.
• Prioritize your corporate message and architecture over individual employee thought leadership.
• A strong B2B tagline directly states exactly what you do in six words.
• Value propositions must speak to the buyer's deep, emotional bottom-line heart pain.
• Stop reacting to competitor gimmicks and lean fully into your authentic tone.

Transcript

You cannot slap a vision and mission on a homepage of a website and expect to go sell somebody like You're not in the business of convincing. You're in the business of converting. psychologically, humans need to know three things in this order to buy from a business, especially in B2B. You have to actually do the analysis to know to know, what is the bottom line heart pain we solve for them.

Welcome back to another episode of the Bridge the Gap podcast where Dale steps over my intro, encourages people to drink coffee. You can drink coffee, you can curse. You can do whatever you want. We're here to have fun.

This show is powered by Revenue Reimagined. And today's guest is Kate De Leo, founder and CEO of Kate De Leo Branding and the creator of the Brand Trifecta. She's helped more than 350 SAS and B2B companies sharpen their messaging so prospects understand instantly what they do, how they solve problems, and why they are different. She believes that brand is the path of least resistance to revenue.

This episode's about simplifying your message so it drives pipeline, shortens the sales cycles and turns your brand into a conversation engine. Not to mention, Kate De Leo is a dear friend of Revenue Reimagined. Well, of me. No one's really Dale's friend.

I'm sorry. Whatever, I like Dale too. Okay, welcome to the show. Thanks for being here.

Dale. I'm so excited. I'm so excited to be here. We could be coffee friends.

There you go. Adam Adam Adam probably has his iced coffee. This doesn't work. This does not work without a large a large coffee most days, right?

Or two. Or two. Welcome to the show. Thanks for being here.

And welcome to the show, Kate. We're excited to have you. friend of the show. No, not of Adam, but that's okay.

Oh my God. So you talk a lot about brand is not a logo. So when you describe brand in the path of least resistance for revenue, what does that actually mean for B2B companies? Yeah, so first off, I want to just kind of like state it.

When you hear that word brand, it's very nebulous, isn't it? You're like, purple, unicorns, ah. And while like there like logo and visual identity is of course an critical part of brand, I would never say no to that. Um, here's the thing.

At the end of the day, your brand is really the promise and the articulation to the marketplace and to your customers that gets to the heart of how you're directly solving their deepest problems and driving value. And so, when brand is written in such a way where you're clearly articulating that in that first 15 seconds, what that does is it creates the path of least resistance to revenue because customers are able to very clearly understand, oh my gosh, you get me. Now tell me how it works. What's that next step for me to engage and purchase.

And that's ultimately what we want with a brand message is to get them there as quickly as possible. Very cool. And brand, I think you're so right. I think brand is super nebulous and I think a lot of people try to associate like they look at marketing and they're like, is that brand?

Like, what is brand? How does brand work? And I think most people don't realize that even at an individual level, your brand that you're running individually actually helps organizations. And I think that becomes a big challenge with a lot of with a lot of companies.

They they have this, I think they're getting better at it, but they have like this friction of like, who has a better brand? Is it the company or is it the individual? Right. And I'd argue I I'd argue that I feel every individual needs to build a brand.

A 100%. The if you look at who's following a company page versus who's following an individual page and where business comes in, it's always in my opinion, the individual. Absolutely. So how do you reckon with that?

How do you reckon with that from a brand architecture standpoint? So we if we think about just a logic train of thought here, right? I always say like, what great brands do is they have kind of this order of operations of their messaging. And I'm I'm a big framework girl.

You know me, I'm a total pragmatist, Adam and Dale. Like I'm like, listen, A + B + C equals outcome and if it's not, what are we doing here? Like stop it. This should be simple math.

So what does it mean when it comes to how do you create an architecture for your organization, your brands, your your your organization's brand in alignment with a personal brand, especially when we see CEOs and founders who have really strong presence on LinkedIn for example, in the B2B and tech space. How how do they reckon with that? Well, the first thing that I want us to always remember is that traditionally, the the organizational brand is going to take precedence in a positive way. And what I mean by that is at the end of the day, even thought leaders, if you look at a lot of these CEOs of great fast scaling companies in the SAS space, you still notice that there is a thread and a tie back to their organizational brand every time they post, every time that they're putting out content, whether that's on social, through whatever it is.

And so what does that mean? What we're always wanting to do is think about the tip top of the this hierarchy is going to always be the organizational brand that articulates the promise of this is what we do, this is how we solve your problem and this is how we're different, that value drive, okay? From there, here's what's really cool. From there, you can not only go down layers deeper into audience specific brand messaging, uh, sector specific, product positioning, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

It's like a big old pyramid. But what we often see that great brands do is they've got a couple thought leaders sitting right alongside that are building these what we call sister brands, these personal brands that still tie into the same ethos. They don't deviate actually from the same value-based messaging. But what they're doing so brilliantly is they're sharing personal stories in context and how that ties back to the overarching brand.

That's where it gels. Hmm. And so how do you like how because a lot of companies that we talk to, and I think they struggle with this a lot, especially brands that haven't done this in the past, how do you actually get a face of the business? Like who is the face of the business?

How do you articulate who that should be? Oh. Definitely should not be Adam for us, but we can we can go down that All right, I have so there's a lot of layers to this question and then I know Adam has a question too. But okay, so face the business often actually does depend on size and stage of company.

Let me explain. So when you are scaling up and you are especially what I would say that's sub $10 million brand, we we still see a lot more CEO founder-led presence on LinkedIn and on social and speaking on stages and curing the thought leadership torch for the organization. And so their job often as they're trying to scale and get up and out of the business is to go, I got to start to carry the flag of thought leadership for this organization and have a presence out there and a voice for people to listen to and want to understand our perspective, our lens on the world. And that's where CEO founder personal brands are really important.

Now, that being said, what we start to see though, is a beautiful expansion of that where you get CMOs, CROs, in-seat operators that are coming to the table now and also putting their voice in the marketplace, still again, tying it back to the corporate brand, at some layer. But what they're now doing is then it's the C-suite team as a collective that has strong perspective on how they're doing their work, how it ties into the value they're delivering and overarching, what does that mean for the ecosystem? So there there there is a moment of maturation where you start to see that where it's usually above 10 million where I start to really see a C-suite team working together in tech. But what what happens when it goes wrong?

So there there's when I think of brand, when I think of companies that have like a great brand and social presence, like I think Gong was the pioneer of like, holy shit, like you have a brand, right? Everyone knows your brand. Um, Apollo had a great, had, had past tense, a great brand. And then it all fell apart because they were doing shady shit that they shouldn't have been doing and, you know, people found out about it and all these influencers that they were paying to drive their brand, suddenly didn't exist.

How do you prevent that? Whether it's the C-suite that is driving the brand, whether it's paid influencers that's driving the brand, whether it's employees that suddenly get disgruntled who are, you know, doing a great job of building their brand, while at the same time building X company brand, and then I'll I'll use Brian LaMana as example, right? He he's a Gong Enterprise AE, he's fantastic. He has a great personal brand, but it all ties to Gong.

If Brian were to leave Gong tomorrow and say, fuck Gong, they're horrible, they're awful, that's going to hurt their brand. How how do you reconcile that? Um, so and protect your brand. Yeah, so there's a couple There's like three things I want to hit on.

Okay. So first and foremost, the way that this works successfully, is you got to first have the darn organizational brand nailed. You can I'm sorry, like you've got to have your ducks in a row. And when I say that, you can not just say, oh, our employees know our vision and mission and values.

Want, want. That doesn't sell. You can not slap a vision and mission on a homepage of a website and expect to go sell somebody like, wow, Bob, thank you so much for talking to me about how you want to change the world. Well, it's like it's like the old DEI when DEI was popular.

Because we say DEI on the website, we hire diversely. No, you don't. So okay, so there first and foremost, get your damn brand ducks in a row. You know, like you've got to put pen to paper and actually write this thing and there is formula and theory to that.

There's it's not as hard as you think it is. Like there's really some practical steps you can take to nail that infrastructure so that everybody is beating to the same drum and you're giving every employee, including your C-suite team, the five to six word tagline that says what you do. We blank. Uh, the two statement value proposition statement that says, the reality is boom, and here's how to solve that with us.

The top three to five big bullets that are differentiator statements to say how you are, yes, better than the competition. Everybody needs to know that. In order to do that, it has to be codified. You've got to codify that language and write it down and map it and get it in every marketing material and sales deck and homepage of your website, it's got to be across the board.

If you don't have that, congratulations, all your people are going to probably unintentionally go rogue on social. So that's first. Secondly, you have to, and Mark, and this is really important for sales and marketing and C-suite to align on this, is you've got to give some talking points or or point people to say, here's the threads we would love for you to tie back to. You you've got to prompt them.

So what I always see is that when this is done really well, you can say, you know, when you're writing, can you tie it back to our core value prop? Can you make sure that you're hitting on that core crux of a tagline somehow in that scene, like, how could you tie it back to a story that also represents the organization and your personal experience, because we want both to shine. But you've got to give them specific ways to do that and be very explicit in that. That's the second thing.

Third, when it goes bad is, let's say somebody gets fired, here's what I would say. If you've done a good job allowing that person's personal brand to shine, whether or not they're at the organization, your risk is actually pretty low, because you're not dominating and like coming down on them saying, every post you do has to be about X, Y, and Z company. Instead, you're allowing room and space as you should as organizational leadership to allow that person to still articulate their perspective in the marketplace. And if you do that very well, where you're not trying to domineer it, your risk is low that somebody could come and have a backlash to you.

But Adam, let me address the third piece that you were talking about, which was, what happens if somebody goes rogue and they have a personal brand and they leave the company and now they're at a competitive company? Oh my God, God forbid. And we see this a lot. And they're like, such and such tool sucks and now I'm just a total believer in A, B, and C and follow me and I'm all about this.

Okay, how do you prevent that? Number one, you and your C-suite team need to be sharper than ever with what your content you're posting in terms of staying you you do not deviate from your core message. You actually speak it louder of who you are and what you're about, because otherwise you're in a reactionary mode. And you're not in the business of convincing, you're in the business of converting.

So you stay in your lane and you beat the brand drum harder than ever. Number two, you give more contextual stories more than ever around your brand's differentiation points of why you are different and better than what that person's saying over here. Those are your two big things that you've got to do very strongly. And if you do that, your risk really does decrease.

I I love what you just, sorry, Dale, I'm going to step on you since you normally step on me. What you just said is so important. You're not in the business of convincing, you're in the business of converting. How often do we collectively see people trying to convince versus convert?

And if you feel like you have to convince, is your brand right? Not only that. Are they are they your people? Just asking.

Like, let's let's let's I mean, that's a whole separate conversation that Dale will spend three hours on. But let's talk about this for a second because I do think that that's important. Like, someone's like, well, how do you start with brand? How do you put pen to paper?

You go Chat GPT, you go figure out the company, you go use search on. Stop. Hold on. Pause.

To even begin to write this sucker, congratulations, you got to do a bit of analysis. And here's the analysis. Who are the humans that are ideal for us behind the category we believe we should serve? You you need an ICP.

Oh my God. And not just to say, we serve enterprise manufacturers. That's outstanding, Susan. Tell me more about that.

Like, who are the people? What are their characteristics? Do you have psychographics? W W bureaucracy, decision-making style?

In fact, one of the most important things you have to do is paint a picture of ideal. You have to have ideal utopia in your mind of that buyer. And why is that? Um, Adam and Dale, you're both happily married.

But when remember the last time you dated? If you were to go out into the world's Dale's been married a lot longer than I I have. I remember last time I did. Dale probably can't remember the last time he dated.

I'm a single mom at 40 and dating in your 40s, by the way, I always say wear a helmet. But, um, it's a bumpy ride. But I will say this, you know, you're out there. That is a different show coming up on the next episode of The Bridge the Gap podcast.

But here's what's so interesting, right? Imagine, I always stick in the dating analogy to everybody last. I'm like, remember when you were like looking to meet your person? Okay.

If you had gone into the world saying, well, I'm looking for decent. Like, how good of a human do you think that you would actually find? Nobody has everything on your list. So actually, in order to find great, really highly aligned people, ICP, buyers that are ready, they're hungry, their pain is so strong, you got to know ideal so that you can spot the ones that actually have about like 75% of your list.

You have to do that first before you even write the message. Here's the second piece I have to tell you, though. In order to do a really strong message that converts, and you talk about not convincing convincing versus converting, you can't just know what you do for them. You have to actually do the analysis to know to know, what is the bottom line heart pain we solve for them?

This is the pain we solve, how we do that is through amazing products and services. And that is what flips the dynamic of the entire brand script, where in two to three sentences on the homepage, someone's like, holy shit, you get me. Yeah, the emotional part of it. They need to they need to be tied into the emotional, not just the number part of it.

So it's funny you say that because right before this meeting, Dale and I were working on our homepage. Um, and there was a line on there that I said, you know, while that's great, is that really going to tell someone what we do? Are they really going to get it? Um, so coming full circle.

Let's talk about the Brand Trifecta. Um, you know, that is the Kate De Leo term. Um, the Brand Trifecta. What are the three components and why are those the three components that you believe are so powerful that businesses need to know?

Yeah, so I'm going to give you a quick context contextual story here on this and like how this even came about, cuz I don't know about you guys, but I have no idea how I got here in my career. Like, I'm older millennial. I'm like, what am I doing? No idea.

I mean, Dale must have drugged me to get here. Okay, so so part I ask myself every day. So why do I say that? Because actually, here's what happened.

Here's how I even stumbled upon this damn theory and like what were the three components. So, rewind People buy from people. That's why companies who invest in meaningful connections win. The best part?

Gifting doesn't have to be expensive to drive results. Just thoughtful. Sendoso's intelligent gifting platform is designed to boost personalized engagement throughout the entire sales process. Trust me, I led sales for Sendoso competitor and I can tell you no one does gifting better than Sendoso.

If you're looking for a proven way to win and retain more customers, visit sendoso.com. Um, market crashes. This was like 2007, 2008.

I'm in academia. I was planning to pursue a PhD in linguistic anthropology. So I was a total language nerd. I was over here like, I'm going to be a professor.

No. I was not going to be a professor cuz the market crashed. And I had a professor actually tell me like, this is a great idea, Kate, but you should probably leave academia, go get a day job and pay off your undergrad debt. And my Italian father, cuz I was living at home was like, please get a job and leave our home.

We love you so much, but like, you need to leave now. So what did I do? I thought it was a really smart idea, you guys, to take a job cold calling IT professionals to sell them $2500 training classes. IT is not easy to call in.

Right. You think they want to be called and sold to? And I was calling, by the way, I was calling developers too. Even like, if I could have Where was my brain?

Okay, so I chose probably the hardest audience to call into and I'm in this job. I promise there's a point of this. I'm in this damn job and they give me put me through two weeks of sales training. They're like, yes, here's your big like book of scripts and I had like sales logics is the CRM and the only automation we had was, do you remember in Microsoft 2008 where you could copy and paste an email template and we're like, the wizardry.

And so this was my life and my job was to smile and dial 40 to 60 calls a day, okay? So here I am. I'm using all their scripts and I'm like, well, this is shit. None of this is working and I'm going to be out of a job before I get my first paycheck.

Like, I got to figure this sucker out. So, being a problem child that I am, I unsubscribed my 10,000 lead database from their marketing campaign and pissed off the head of marketing. I threw out the sales scripts and I decided I was just going to go rogue and try something. All I did was I called these people and in 15 seconds I said, hi, my name is Kate.

I'm with such and such company. This is what we do and this is how we can solve your problem and top three things you should know why we're different. And then I would shut up. And believe it or not, it worked.

And how it worked is in typical IT fashion, the guys were like, so yeah, I'm in the middle of a deployment right now, but if you can email me on that, click. Um, I'm really busy right now, call me in six months, click. Yeah, can you send me a PDF with that so I can get it approved and I'll be back in six months, click. Well, what was happening is I was somehow breaking through that barrier and what I honestly didn't know is that it was brand.

But what I was actually articulating was the three core components that I've I've been able to prove out later with psychology is that psychologically humans need to know three things in this order to buy from a business, especially in B2B. The first thing is you have to hit me fast with what you do. Now, how does that show up in brand? That's your tagline.

Your tagline is the five to six word articulation of what you do. Now, I'm going to I'm going to hit on this for a second. Well, Kate, how come um Nike can have a tagline that says, just do it. Loreal, you're worth it.

Okay, cuz let me explain something. My friends, we're in B2B, right? Okay. What is the first question that somebody asks you when you walk into the room?

What do you do for a living? Now, that that means, unfortunately for us B2B folks, our tagline has to be a bit more boring, just a little bit more boring to kind of hit at that. Whereas the first question that a consumer asks me when you're selling them a product is not what do you do? The first question they ask is, tell me the promise of who I will be or what I will experience when I have your product in my hand.

And that is why you lovely B2C folks get away with murder and we get to see these awesome, cool, snazzy taglines. So, number one is a tagline, five to six words. Number two, to follow that up is if you have a great tagline and they're like, really, what do you mean by that? Is you got to express, well, what I mean is here's the reality of your situation.

Here's the pain you're facing. Here's how to solve that with this product or offering. That's a value prop. So you got to expand on the tagline and that's the meat right there.

That value prop's the meat. Your tagline and value prop work together. But here's here's what's fascinating and I promise I'll wrap this up. Why three things?

Why Brand Trifecta? Why did I go, you can't just have a tagline and a value prop. Kate, that's good enough. And 90% of a SAS companies and tech companies that I see in the world have a a tagline and a value prop.

But what's going on? Why isn't it it converting? Okay. Imagine I was in the room with you, Adam and Dale and like we're talking and we're having this conversation, you're like, what do you do?

And I give you my tagline. You're like, oh, what do you mean by that? And I deliver my value prop. For us, the owners of the brand, we would psychologically think that like, oh my gosh, Dale and Adam are so ready to know about my amazing branding services.

Right? Let me tell him all the stuff about how cool my project is. But you're not ready for it yet. And why is that?

Because what I just did is I just delivered two highly provocative, not pretentious, provocative pieces of information that got you thinking. And what happens is is when the brain takes in that new data, that new information, do you know what it has to do to make sense of it? It has to compare you against something it already has in its file folder. So what's happening here, my friends, is that you give them the coolest tagline and value prop as you should.

And in order for this to really gel, that person needs to make sure they're tracking with you, whether they read it or hear it. And so they're going to compare you to the competition. And believe it or not, you need to allow this comparison moment to happen, because it's going to clear up the noise. Now, verbally, by the way, you get this every single time in a conversation because somebody goes, so, Kate, are you like a graphic designer or a copywriter or do you like run an agency?

Right? Like they're just trying to track it and put me in a bucket. Rightfully so. Right?

Adam, are you guys like CROs or do you have like an agency? Like what do you do? Right? All the time.

Are you fractional? What does that mean? All right. So they start throwing jargon at you and I go, oh my gosh, Dale, such a great question.

I'm different. Here's how. And I can hit on those three big bullet points. Boom, boom, boom.

And once I do, third and final piece, differentiators, this is where the conversion moment happens. This is when the person asks the how, what question where they look at you and go, oh, yeah. Okay. That makes sense.

So, Kate, so how does that work or what does that look like? How does that work? What does that look like? In a conversation, when you hear the how, what question, they are signaling to you, got it.

Tell me how you deliver on that. What's the product features? What's the the pricing? What's included?

What's your proprietary methodology? And by the way, on a website, this is where you can clock every single damn time with analytics if they're going to go to your offerings pages. Like clockwork. That's where they're going to go.

So, to sum this up, you can not just stand on a cool tagline. You can not just stand on a cool tagline and a value prop. You've got to have all three to allow your buyer to have the comparison moment to psychologically self-select in, a k a convert, where they're ready to know more after they hear all three. And if you do that and you're really strong in that, you are no longer convincing.

You are converting. And you have a higher qualified prospect who's coming to the table to go, I already know all this stuff. Tell me what it costs. Hallelujah.

Yep. All right, I'm off my soapbox. So no, I I love this because I always think when when we work with clients and we start with value proposition, but the tagline is super important. Um and we build out what we're calling go to market foundations, which kind of bleeds in from sales and marketing, which is value proposition, ideal customer profile, buying persona, competitive analysis, like how you stack up against people.

I'm the the thing that I try to figure out is even the tagline or the value proposition, even if they can get it, like super succinct and and um and nailed, you become noise because you sound like everybody else. So I always try to ask them, what is five to six words, call it 10, 15. Whatever you want to call the number of words, not 350. But like, what are the 10 or 15 words that you can say that no one else in the market can say as well or very limited people because they go into exactly what you said.

They try to put you in a bucket and they're like, you're like this person, you're like, no, I'm not like that person or that company or what they're delivering. Yeah, and that's where differentiator statements and and they're short and they're quippy and they're fast. They really come into play. The other thing to think about too is um tone of voice really matters for for brand.

So remember how we were talking earlier about personal brand with leadership versus corporate brand? What I do want you to know is that the organizational brand's tone of voice is usually a summation of everybody in the collective presence in the market, okay? Um, unless you are just a single founder-led company, in which God bless you, you are the brand, go for it. Um, and it's your tone of voice.

But I will say this is that tone of voice is important because there's so much corporate jargon out there. And we always laugh at like the M-dash is now Chat GPT and all this other stuff. And how many semicolons are in that sentence, Kate, right? Okay.

So much. To get through that and to this is language architecture, to tighten, to have rhythm in that right syntax where it's boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom and someone's almost pulled down into the message. If you're like a musician, you get that. Like you can hear it.

is that's a tone of voice thing. And that's really imperative that you nail that so that it's not a bunch of mumbo jumbo and it actually sticks out. You know who's brand is really good at doing this? Wistia.

You guys familiar with Wistia, the video platform? Holy hell, they have never deviated from their tone of voice. Chris has done such a great job with his team. I've worked with their brand team last summer and to get to learn from them what how they articulated that was so powerful.

Every person in that organization feeds to that tone of voice. So I I think so I agree with you in the sense of you have to have a single tone of voice. People have to tie back to that while maintaining individuality. But companies grow, right?

Companies scale. Bless you, Dale. Messaging becomes fragmented, you know, different people, different things. Like even we're experiencing this and we're a small company.

How do you protect clarity during growth? How do you protect brand clarity during growth? Well, I think someone's got to own it first of all. So first of all, if you don't have somebody in in the organization who is the keeper of the brand keys, it's going to be a slippery slope.

Now, most logically, could it be your head of marketing? Sure. But can I be honest with you? Sales and marketing need to own it together.

I can't stress this enough. I don't even build a brand unless sales is in the room. I won't even touch it with a 10-foot pole, because I constantly see that I've done these projects in the past and then we just shot ourselves in the foot because sales is like, uh, we don't talk like that on the calls. I love that.

Like, what? You know, right? So please hear me on this. Like, don't go build your brand in a bubble.

Like, you got to have sales in the room. You got to have C-suite leadership in the room every single damn day of the week to get this thing nailed and get alignment on it. But somebody's got to own it. So whoever's in charge of website, assets, and and and social marketing needs to kind of be the keeper of that in order to ensure that as you're expanding your your motions and you're really kind of expanding reach out there, that there is consistency in all of that.

I would say two, the second big thing is how do you how do you keep clarity as you scale? It's something that you need to have a practice and a rhythm to revisit, probably annually, where you're coming back to the table, and it can be a daylong exercise, a half-day exercise where the team's getting together in the room, as you have like new product features. Let's say you're expanding offerings. And the team's coming together and going, can we do a pulse check on this?

What are we missing? What's been talked about in the last three to six months if we went and analyze sales calls that actually is coming to the forefront. What other pains are we starting to hear? Has the pain shifted?

So there does need to be this this routine analysis so that the the brand can stay as up-to-date as humanly possible. And then the third and final thing is remember that at moments of maturation in growth, one message can not rule them all anymore. What you started with five years ago probably won't work anymore. So, you may go, gosh, this is where we have to do audience or sector specific pages on our website that get a bit deeper with a value prop for them and differentiators for them.

Good. Build it. Oh my gosh, you know what we're constantly spinning our wheels on is we keep talking about our methodology in circles. Maybe you need to write that.

So that's that's the process. I I I want to we're we're getting close to time for a rapid fire, but I I we're no, we're going to go over a little bit because I have a question for you. So all of this is true as you mature. How do you avoid gimmicks?

And and what I mean by this is a certain company yesterday had every single employee in that company update their title on LinkedIn to revenue architect. Say it and it is true. I mean, I I put powerball winner on mine and I checked my bank account this morning and it didn't happen. But nonetheless, how do you avoid gimmicks?

Because the way that I saw this, um was by multiple people commenting like, eh, just because you say you're a revenue architect doesn't mean you are. Now, you might push back and say, listen, they got the attention that they wanted by doing this. But like, how do you avoid the gimmicks when you're trying to shape your brand as you grow? How much time do we have?

Um, as long as you want. I think one of the most important, when I see, when I see that, can I be honest with you? They're trying to put a stake in the ground with language that they say, this is going to make us sound really important and powerful and differentiated. So while I love the sentiment of trying to be differentiated and trying to have everybody aligned and like have the title, um, and even if that word and the language is in your tone of voice, cool.

Maybe that's what you do for your company. Maybe you actually do build revenue architectures for companies. I don't know. I don't know who this brand was.

When I hear what you just described, though, is you're back in convincing land. Something else is going on behind the curtain first of all. I'll tell you that. And secondly, I would also have this assumption that this person's view or the leadership's view of brand is that you have to change your spots to adjust to your audience.

And that is the biggest misconception on brand. You do not deviate from who you are. Brand is not aspirational. It is relational and here and now, people.

So that means. Not aspirational, relational. That means that you can't fake it till you make it. Dale.

I hear you here. Well, but so and so's doing this, Kate, and our competition is saying this. Go, let them be. Stop worrying about your competition.

And I I I say that as someone who's guilty of it. I will send Dale something that one of our competitors posted and he's the first one who's like, why are you looking at that? Do you know this sounds terrible? I actually have to mentally, because I'm an analyst brain sometimes, I refuse to look at my competition and I refuse to look at LinkedIn too much because I I start to go down these rabbit trails and for me, I'm like, I got to keep a real clear head here of like, show up as your best self on every call, Kate.

So, how do you do that? You got to just know who you are and remember that like attracts like. There is enough business in the world, honestly, that if they're doing a good job, if your competition is doing a really good job being blue, let them go be blue in a sea of blue and green. And maybe you're supposed to be hot pink.

And there are people craving hot pink who are so tired of blue and green that it is your duty, by the way, as a brand, to freaking own it and love it and live it. And all of a sudden, you're going to see a shift that the right qualified buyers come in and you're no longer having to like, oh, but spin that story. 100%. But they're just like, goddamn it, I was waiting for hot pink.

Thank you so much because that is so refreshing. I tried blue and blue sucks. And we will yeah. And we will leave it with hot pink and we will move into some hot pink rapid fire.

Kate, what company out there first first company that comes to mind that has the best brand right now? Oh shit. I love Wistia, honestly. I can't get enough of them and I'm going to tell you two reasons.

One, their corporate brand's brilliant. They don't deviate from their tone of voice. And number two, Chris, the CEO, God, he's so good. You look at his content, he's so good and he's fun and he's got a personality.

So I love Wistia. Harder to fix, weak product or weak positioning? Uh, weak product. I think weak positioning can 100% get fixed any damn day of the week if you're willing to sit in the room and do it.

I don't know. Nowadays you could just you can vibe code anything that you want, so I don't know. That's your weak product. Go tell us to your product leaders and see what they say.

Yeah. I so yeah. Go ahead, Dale. It's an interesting debate because actually I spoke to a company a of they're doing like 10, 15 million.

All their product people are using are using Claude code to actually code product now. So, I love that. I think it depends on the culture and the company and what you're building. But yeah, there are companies just killing it right now doing that.

What's the one brand buzzword you wish would disappear forever? Transformative, transformation. If I hear one more company say that they're transforming something, I'm like, what? I like it.

Last one, Kate, dream vacation destination. How much time you got? Uh, coming up next. I will be in hopefully Iceland this next year.

So I really want to go hike that glacier. That's awesome. You're on mute, Adam. awesome.

This isn't that's the best part. Kate De Leo, thanks for joining the Bridge to Gap podcast. Yes. I've been on mute because I'm sick and I don't want you guys to hear me coughing and I clearly did not hit the space bar enough.

Dale should be on mute permanently. I'm looking for that invention that allows me to mute unmute him, but I have not found it yet. Stop it. Thank you for joining the show.

Where other than LinkedIn can people find you and learn about how to properly Well, you can just check out my website. I'm keep it pretty simple. Just go to katele.com.

That's K A T E D E L E O .com. Thanks for joining the show. Thanks, guys.

Thanks, Kate.