How your ‘Team Brand’ can make your BD team stronger: Take-aways from my workshop for Westpac
“The value for me: Being able to communicate effectively, to build the brand externally.” – Team Member
Even as highly professional people, there can be roadblocks in your team’s visibility among networks and your ability to quickly gain trust with new contacts. Yet visibility and trust are essential to achieving your team’s business development goals.
Building your ‘Team Brand’ is a powerful way to boost trust and visibility for your own personal profile, your team, and your organisation!
In a recent workshop for Westpac, we spent time getting clear on the BD team’s ‘brand’. This involved looking at the organisation’s brand values as a whole and exploring what they mean to team members… but also spending time uncovering what makes this particular team so great: What are our capabilities, our passions, our strengths? What mix of experience and skills do we bring to our team that creates value for our stakeholders?
“Really understanding what we’re good at as a team and having a defined communication plan were key. This clarified our focus and new business quickly started coming in!” – Regional GM
We started with a SWOT Analysis on the team’s brand presence. Understanding where they currently sat in terms of brand clarity, visibility and confidence as a team, helped us work out where they want to go.
We then dove into exploring our own personal brands: What do we (knowingly or otherwise) communicate about ourselves? How do we position ourselves at introductions? How do we communicate with confidence and influence in networking and business development conversations?
“My biggest take-away was being clear on my personal brand to position myself in the market, to be more confident and to demonstrate experience.” – Team Member
After a delicious morning tea break, team members then worked together to unpack how the business brand and their own personal brands can intersect to bring a powerful messaging focus to communications and networking at the individual level, empowering not only Westpac’s brand presence in WA, but that of the individual BDMs.
We focused our brainstorming on 4 key components: Our Values, Audiences, Value Proposition and Communication Tools.
Finally, we workshopped a structure for a Team Action Plan to develop team visibility and relationship-building with target market segments, that the team are rolling with – they have since built this into their overarching strategic plan and are moving forward with clarity and purpose.
It was a great pleasure to work with fantastic leadership at Westpac, and a team of highly skilled, passionate, professional people who clearly care deeply about outcomes for their customers.