The Brooks Group is changing and growing, and it’s for the better. We’re growing in terms of revenue and staff size. We’re streamlining our systems and processes to make absolutely sure that our clients have a best-in-class experience with us at every touch point. And the best part of all of this? Because we’re getting more opportunities to engage larger clients on a deep, deep level (conducting much more robust pre-training sales team analyses, deeper content customization, and longer-term sales and sales management coaching programs), we’re fulfilling our mission of affecting truly transformative change inside of our clients’ sales organizations. And, because our business is growing and changing, we determined that it was high time to take a look at our corporate identity and initiate a corporate rebranding process. While our buyer personas (the typical individuals whom we target and who evaluate the decision to hire an outsourced sales training company) and the ways in which we improve our clients’ overall sales effectiveness are changing and improving, our core values involving how we want our prospects and customers to see us are not. When you interact with The Brooks Group’s brand, website, print materials, classroom materials, etc., we really want you to think of words like:
- Straightforward
- Commonsense
- Flexible
- Solid
- Proven
- Experienced
- Innovative
- Street-smart
- Easy-To-Implement
Quite frankly, we want to be easy to do business with. We want you to think of us as the sales training company whose processes just make sense. Our solutions don’t require “rocket scientists” to implement. We want to provide you with uncomplicated sales effectiveness tools that enable salespeople, not hinder them. With that in mind, as we evaluated our company and more specifically, our logo and branding, it hit me like a ton of bricks:
We had several different versions of our logo that were being used in various ways in multiple places, our font choices and imagery were inconsistent and depending on where you interacted with us (LinkedIn, Twitter or our corporate website), you’d likely see a different “look and feel” at each place!
The use of inconsistent imagery, logo variations and colors across a company’s brand doesn’t inspire the words that I’d like for you to think of when you interact with The Brooks Group. With that in mind, we set out to undergo a complete and formal corporate rebranding. After doing some due diligence on various vendors, we partnered with a marketing agency specializing in brand identity development. The project began with the agency’s conducting extensive research that included interviews with The Brooks Group’s:
- Owners, senior managers and staff
- Current clients
- Past clients
- Prospects to whom we presented but who didn’t actually buy from us
The goal for the marketing agency was to get an objective view of how The Brooks Group is perceived:
- Internally
- Externally
- By existing clients
- By companies which didn’t hire us
Overall, we were impressed with the process, as it was very thorough. Some of the words which were used to describe our firm during the interviews (respondents’ words, not ours!) included:
- “Down-to-earth”
- “Easy to talk to”
- “Took time to ‘learn our language’”
- “Professional”
- “Earned our trust”
- “Genuine and easy to talk with”
This information in and of itself was a huge win, as it’s almost exactly what we hope our clients and prospects think of us! It got better, though. In the interviews with companies who compared us to our competition in a formal vendor selection process, we were described as more “personal” than the other sales training providers. Awesome. Finally, when asked about the best features of The Brooks Group, respondents shared that these included:
- “Organization and preparation” (we call that Pre-Call Planning in our IMPACT Selling® process)
- “Sales model” (IMPACT Selling)
- “The process just made sense”
- “Fit individual business models”
- “Our assessment process”
Once we got the interview information compiled, the work involving the actual logo and color scheme selection began. Working together (all the while keeping the findings of the interviews in mind), The Brooks Group went through 5 iterations of logo development, each time getting closer and closer to the “right” option. We knew that we wanted simply to use a “B” as the mainstay of the logo (in fact, many of our really long-term clients – 7+ years with us – refer to us only as “Brooks,” hence the importance of the “B”). In addition, we wanted it to be able to stand on its’ own and be recognizable, whether or not it was seen in conjunction with our trade name, “The Brooks Group.” I’ll bet we looked at least 75 versions of our new logo and the folks at the marketing agency were incredibly patient and conscientious. Believe it or not, in the final analysis, the version that resonated with us the most was literally the last option of the last iteration. In my opinion though, it was good that we held back, that we kept working on it and we didn’t settle on something just because we needed to make a choice. Being relentless about our decision paid off. Our logo choice, in our opinion, is straightforward, classic, and inspires (at least we think) a perception of solid experience with an eye toward the future. And here’s the final version:
So, if you’re an existing customer of The Brooks Group’s, prepare to interact with a brand-new logo, color scheme and corporate look and feel that will be applied consistently across our communications. We really hope you like it.
