Owning And Growing Brand Awareness And Community Outreach

As outlined in my first blog of this series, my Intrapreneurial role as Director of Business and Community Development for our company, Key Person of Influence, comes down to two important areas of focus:

• Brand awareness/community outreach

• Feeding the sales funnel with uber-qualified candidates

Brand Awareness and Community Outreach

This is mostly grass roots marketing. By that, I mean it’s feet on the ground, networking, creating interesting events and inviting prospects to them, spreading the word about our company in both basic and creative/non-traditional ways.

It’s finding opportunities to get our leaders in front of other community leaders and influencers, like Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn and Rhea Law. It’s joining professional groups like Tampa Bay Business Owners and Working Women of Tampa Bay, charitable boards, like UT Board of Fellows and alumni networks, like my alma mater, the University of Michigan Tampa Bay Chapter.

It’s writing blogs and finding media opportunities. I do all of that and more.

Brand Awareness, for me, is personally assimilating our corporate brand identity so that my own professional brand and the company brand are one-in-the-same.

When people hear our company name or see our logo, they think of me. When people hear the words “growth accelerator” they think of me. When a business owner says “I feel like I’m working so hard and can’t ever go on vacation” the person they are talking to thinks “I need to introduce this person to Jodi McLean at KPI”. I get our company’s name, logo, and pitch out there so clearly and completely that the professional community knows who we are, what we do, who we work with and who we don’t. I strive every day to own and command our business niche.

My main focus is the role of marketing, and I oversee the sales team. As the marketing arm, I feed the sales funnel and my sales team closes new business. I came up through the ranks in the sales role, and that has helped me become a far more effective marketer. I know who our target client is, and I know our sales language. I can tee up pre-qualified candidates, and warm them up tremendously for our Sales team to schedule them for the sales pitch. Having this sales background and a clear delineation of the hand-off helps to shorten the sales cycle, immensely. But, frankly, that’s a bonus. My Sales Manager calls me a “sales person’s dream.”

I fill the funnel with warm, qualified leads…not a bunch of D-level prospects to satiate “the numbers game”.

We’ve graduated beyond that. When your pitch is concise and polarizing, A-level prospects will gravitate to you and D-level prospects will disqualify themselves. That’s laser-focused Brand Awareness. And that’s all about defining your target marketing, and then honing and niching your pitch.