In her latest book, Branding & Marketing YOU through Teams, branding and marketing specialist Donna Rachelson examines how team branding can help high-performing teams to stand out in the competitive business environment.
She looks at six different teams, ranging from corporate business teams to a sports team and an NGO, and unpacks the lessons we can learn from them. One of the chapters focuses on the Sanlam Personal Finance Micro Marketing Team, which functions as the behind the scenes internal marketing engine to the Sanlam product and service distribution channel.
This team proves that you can have a high-functioning ‘team,’ spread all around a country – they don’t have to work under one roof. Because they embrace the same values and are self-motivated perfectionists, holding themselves and everyone they work with to very high standards, they deliver a phenomenal, evolving service. They constantly ask for feedback. From their peers, their clients, their team leader. The team leader is highly regarded across the board. They are never satisfi ed with the status quo. They’re comfortable with saying ‘no’ when necessary – because they understand that their role delivers greatest value when it’s strategic rather than operational.
Below are three of the lessons, excerpted from the book, that business teams can take from this dynamic group of people:
1. Place the help where the help is needed. It’s in the interest of any business to get ‘newbies’ as we know them in this internet-driven age, up to speed. Sanlam has cleverly located members of this very supportive micro marketing team all around the country. So they’re based where the help is needed. Not at head office. We can learn from this.
2. If we don’t understand we can’t contribute. Because they understand their internal Sanlam client’s needs and business so well, the micro marketing team is able to make a significant impact on a new arrival in a short space of time. The more we understand our client’s business, and that of their competitors, the better our chance of making a creative, proactive contribution.
3. The digital age compels reinvention and renewal. Never in the history of business has change been driven as hard as it presently is by technological change. We’ve seen umpteen leading product or service providers go out of business in the last decade. The speed and volume of communication and messaging is also at an all-time high. So if we want to remain relevant, we have to be in tech-touch with what’s going on. We do that by reinventing ourselves and what we offer.
