B2B Reads: Primal Branding, Effective Leadership, and Conversational Capacity

In addition to our Sunday App of the Week feature, we also summarize some of our favorite B2B sales & marketing posts from around the web each week. We’ll miss a ton of great stuff, so if you found something you think is worth sharing please add it to the comments below.

Brand Enthusiasts Back Beliefs, Not Products
A brand is a community of people who share the same beliefs despite how much marketers believe they have it under their control. Primal branding is a framework that was developed to help marketers curate their own story as it looks at brands as belief systems and once you’re able to create that belief system, you can attract others who share your beliefs and form a community around it. Thank you, Patrick Hanlon, for helping us understand the real strategy behind strong branding.

How to Strengthen Workplace Connections Outside your Team
An interesting insight that came as a result of the pandemic follows how many interactions within companies’ immediate team or network have developed stronger relationships, however connections outside of this team have grown distant and rare. Cross team connections are imperative to run an organized and effective company. A few ways to make this happen include putting it on the agenda, establishing communities, identifying collaborative projects, and offering a visceral experience. Thank you, Julie Winkle Giulioni, for sharing these insights.

Make Career Conversations a Regular Agenda Item in One-on-Ones
Career development is focused on the employee experience and helps develop strong workers. A strong leader has the ability to recognize what’s personally important to their employees and in turn helps their performance improve. It’s important to have ongoing conversations, deal with doubts, ensure employee happiness, create milestones, and overall develop careers within business. Thank you, Kristin Brookins Costello, for highlighting the importance of professional growth.

Your B2B Website Power Page: Seven Must-Have Ingredients
For more organic traffic and breakthrough conversations for B2B websites, marketers must have a power page. This is content that is strategically designed to rank high on Google’s search engine, that is intended to go viral and receive many backlinks, as well as be 10x stronger than any other article on the website. A strong power page includes informative value, attention to detail, expertise, authoritative domain, structure, emotional response, and promotion. Thank you, Lesley J. Vox, for teaching us about this resourceful tool to help B2B companies boost their website’s reputations.

Engaging the Decision Makers
There are so many more decision makers within the buying decision process than marketers are anticipating. The decision makers can be grouped into three types of people that must be engaged including buyers, stakeholders, and advisors. Thank you, Colleen Francis, for breaking these decision makers down and walking through how to engage each group.

What Are Your Priorities, Really?
It’s common for workers to prioritize the greatest return on their efforts for the success of the entire organization, however it’s also important to note individual measurements of success for personal improvements. While this can be centered close to work, this article encourages employees to look beyond their careers and determine their highest priorities in life to perceive their lives from a more holistic approach. Thank you, Deb Boelkes, for reminding us to identify what’s really important within our lives.

We Have a Creativity Problem
Research has found that many subconsciously view creativity as disruptive which may potentially be discouraging us from taking on an innovative project or hiring creative people. This is backed up by a myriad of negative associations and comes down to creativity intensifying feelings of uncertainty. Overall, this emerging research on implicit bias in creativity reveals the powerful finding of how peoples’ judgements are not only captured by what they say, but what they think as well. Thank you, Matt Ritchel, for this really interesting read on the underlying thoughts of creativity in the workplace.

3 Effective Ways to Lead as a Coach Rather Than a Boss
Learning strong coaching techniques and strategies will help leaders develop more leaders and productive employees in the workplace. Some effective ways that this can be done is by switching from a “fix it” mindset, striving to meet staff where they are, and preparing other leaders to be successful coaches as well. Thank you, Stephanie Peskett, for helping us understand how to be strong coaches and even stronger leaders.

How to Add Autonomy to your Remote Team Culture
With much experience, many have endured the positives and negatives of remote working, however workers are still struggling to understand how to deal with burnout. Studies have found competitive pressures to continue working after hours and outperform one another. Strategies like modeling the habits you want to see, favoring asynchronous work over its counterpart, and working with individuals to set better boundaries will help implement healthier remote working habits. Thank you, Rashan Dixon, for sharing these approaches on how to prevent burnout with remote work.

How Conversational Capacity Improves Workplace Communication
Conversational capacity is the key to attracting, retaining, and engaging top talent in a way that supports good communication. Businesses are dependent on successful communication amongst people working and conversational capacity ensures strong workplace communication. By increasing self-awareness to recognizing defensive tendencies that may negatively influence a conversation, adopting a mindset that prioritizes learning over emotional reactions, and developing a skill set of specific behaviors that enable productive high-stake discussions, your company’s conversational capacity will drastically improve. Thank you, Vistage Staff, for this great read on how to improve workplace communication.