Luxury Sales Force Management

Strategies for Winning Over Your Brand Ambassadors

M. Merk

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137347435
• eBook ISBN: 9781137347442
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Strategy
• Index: Business

The sales team can often make or break the success of new brands or products. This comprehensive guide provides strategies, models and checklists to help managers and directors strengthen the relationships of their firm's sales force with their own or other brands, maximizing turnover and profit in the long run.

chapter 1
What Salespeople Feel in their Hearts: The Sales Force–Brand Relationship Olympic Rings

Using the qualitative and quantitative research of my PhD studies, I have been able to clearly identify relationship patterns between salespeople and their brands – patterns similar to the interpersonal relationship characteristics that occur when two people like or love each other. Before we look at the facets of these relationships let us see how research defines this widely used term. The British psychologist and ethnologist Robert A. Hinde puts forward four central conditions that allow us to talk about a relationship:¹

1. When both partners actively and independently exchange with each other.

2. When both partners decide to engage while being driven by mutual aims.

3. When the relationship allows both partners to benefit from each other.

4. When the commitment’s dynamic slightly changes and evolves over time.

It could be said that it is impossible to interact with brands since they are just simple objects. How can someone actively enter into a relationship with an object, a logo or a product? This argument is exactly why it is so important to bring our brands to life, to breathe a soul in them, to make them human. This phenomenon has been studied by J. Aaker,² and goes back to the first theories of animism that suggest we have a permanent need to anthropomorphize objects so that interactions with the nonmaterial world can be facilitated.³ The personification of brands can be achieved by associating brands with spokespeople such as famous movie stars and by reinforcing the role of the brand’s creator, its representatives or the general manager.

While the relationship between salespeople and their brands has been completely underresearched, scholars have shared interesting insights on the relationship patterns between customers and brands. They have examined why customers remained extremely loyal to certain brands, why they dressed from head to toe in only one brand, why they kept talking about it or why they dreamt about it. Susan Fournier has been among the first to develop a model that includes six dimensions characterizing these consumer–brand relationships:⁴

1. Love and passion for the brand.

2. Identification (or self-connection) with the brand.

3. Brand partner quality expressed through feelings of trust and reliability.

4. Brand commitment as a commitment in the long run.

5. Interdependence resulting from frequent brand use.

6. Intimacy deriving from personal experiences with the brand.

Working from these findings, I wanted to get a better understanding of the relationships I had observed throughout my professional career and that I consider crucial for every brand’s success: the sales force–brand relationships. I wanted to know what salespeople felt inside their hearts when relationships were strong, and which emotional facets characterized these relationships compared with consumer–brand relationships.

FIG 3 The sales force–brand relationship Olympic rings

By analyzing the hundreds of interviews conducted in field research I was able to distinguish five dimensions which form the “Five Olympic Rings of Sales Force–Brand Relationships” (Figure 3):

1. Love and passion for the brand.

2. Identification with the brand.

3. Trust in the brand.

4. The pride of belonging to the brand.

5. Recognition for brand expertise.

While love, identification and trust are emotions shared by consumers and salespeople when forming strong relationships with brands, pride and recognition occur exclusively in a sales context.

When brands succeed in stimulating all five relationship dimensions, they lay the best foundation by turning their sales associates into brand champions. These brand champions are brand ambassadors who burn for their brand. They carry the flame of victory and can lead their brand to tremendous success.

Let’s look more closely at these five emotional aspects in order to understand what salespeople feel in their hearts when the flame is burning.

1.1 LOVE is in the air

We all know this amazing feeling that fills your entire body, and makes your stomach tingle. Feelings of love have an incredible power on our inner energy and the energy we transmit to others. Feelings of love are something supernatural and intangible.

When we are in love, we behave differently; we do things more intensely, with a smile on our faces. Scholars define love as part of an affective state that occurs at various levels of intensity, from liking, loving, feelings of passion and even addiction. All these states of affection were present in one form or another when I interviewed salespeople who strongly related to their brand. Here are some passionate representative statements:

“What motivates me every day is the strong emotion I feel for my brand. This feeling lies deep inside my heart.”

(Lancôme sales representative)

“In order to sell, we need to love what we sell. Otherwise it does not work. This is inevitable.”

(Longchamp store manager)

“When I suggest a brand I love to a client, I speak about it easily with passion, I provide more information and suggest it more often.”

(Sephora sales advisor)

“The arrival of a new product is like a baby born in a family. It’s always an exciting moment.”

(Store manager, high-end watchmaking)

“The Sephora brand is my baby. I got to know the brand very well over the years, I grew up with it in the company and I now defend it like a mother defends her child. I really fell in love with the brand.”

(Sephora sales advisor)

“I like the feeling of being closely related to my brand. This stimulates my working energy every day.”

(Fendi sales associate)

“I need to have a strong emotional connection with my brand, otherwise I couldn’t enjoy selling it and the days would be incredibly long.”

(Fendi sales manager)

“When you like selling you can sell a bit of everything. But you need to be passionate about your brand in order to experience the entire dimension of your brand. Your degree of implication is much higher when you love your brand and its products.”

(Cartier store manager)

“If you are not passionate about your brand, it is incredibly hard to start the selling ritual again and again. You need to enjoy explaining, demonstrating and repeating the same information over and over again to your customers. You really sell with your heart. If you don’t sell with your heart, it gets complicated.”

(High-end watchmaking store manager)

“I never thought that the intensity of loving my brand had such an impact on my sales performance. Without love, no pleasure.”

(Fred sales advisor)

These statements clearly show what salespeople believe: without passion there is no pleasure, no success.

The love and affection we feel for good friends is not very different from the feelings salespeople develop for the brands they sell. Love is there, as long as the good sides of products prevail.

If you want to have friends and love, only look at their positive sides; if you begin looking at their negative sides, there will no longer be friends and love.

For products, it’s exactly the same thing: We are aware of their bad sides in order to show that those are secondary to the good ones.

Michel Guten, Sup de Luxe President, Vice President Comité Champs Elysées, former Vice President of Cartier

In contrast, managers tend to be skeptical about salespeople expressing too much passion for their brand. They prefer salespeople to be experts instead of being fans. Managers think that salespeople should enhance their clients’ passion instead of rival with them. If salespeople are too passionate about their brand or the activity related to it, they are on equal terms with the customer and roles are blurred.

Salespeople who are too passionate don’t listen to their customers since they talk too much about themselves. They destroy the customers’ pride by making them feel inferior. Salespeople should be excellent technicians, not passionate. For instance, I love playing tennis. When I enter a tennis shop and the salesperson tells me that he is an excellent tennis player I feel uncomfortable, as if my opinion no longer counted, as if I had to accept his advice.

(Arnaud Vidal, former Vice President Watches and Jewelry at Ralph Lauren and former General Manager of Audemars Piguet)

It is important that salespeople always respect their customers’ passion first, instead of simply demonstrating their own passion.

How can we see that love is in the air?

There are a number of indicators that allow you to detect when your sales associates have fallen in love with the brand they represent:

1 – A desire to touch

Salespeople who love their brand feel a strong desire to be close to their products. They admire them, touch them, caress them, smell them. All their senses interact with the brand. In fashion, this becomes ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables, Figures and Illustrations
• Foreword
• Key contributors to this book
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Strengthening the Relationship between the Sales Force and their Brand is a Must, Not a Choice!
• 1 What Salespeople Feel in their Hearts: The Sales Force–Brand Relationship Olympic Rings
• 2 Luxury Relationship Branding: Heart-Winning Strategies for Brand Managers and their Corporations
• 3 Ways of Winning Over the Sales Force in the Digital World
• 4 How Brands Can Benefit from Strong Sales Force–Brand Relationships
• 5 Recruitment Strategies for Strong Sales Force–Brand Relationships
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Subject Index
• Name Index
• Brand Index