Our company is better than it looks, and it's costing us deals
In one line
a company can outperform its competitors and still lose to them for looking smaller, and that gap can be closed.
The debrief after a lost deal has a phrase that stings more than the losing. The product was fine, the price was close, the team did well, and the buyer went elsewhere because the other firm "seemed more established". There's nothing in that sentence to argue with. You can rebut a feature comparison. You can't rebut an impression.
If your technology company wins on the work and loses on the look, there's a mechanism behind it.
Why buyers choose the firm that looks more established
Your buyers can't fully test what they're buying before they buy it. So cautious buyers lean on what they can check before signing: how each firm presents itself, who vouches for it, whether the story holds together across everything they find.
When the Hinge Research Institute asked roughly 2,000 buyers of professional services how they choose, reputation came top of the list and cost decided a small minority of selections. The study is US-based, covers professional services broadly, and Hinge sells marketing services to the firms it studies, so read the exact percentages as indicative; the behaviour they capture, buyers choosing on reputation and rarely on price, is the durable part. What you sell gets you considered. Buyers choose on the signals.
The credibility other companies borrowed
Some of your competitors never had this problem, and it's worth being precise about why. A company that raised money got credibility with it: coverage on the day it raised, well-known names attached, and a story the press told for them. None of that means the product is any better. It reads as vouching all the same, and a buyer doing quick research meets it everywhere. A technology company built on its own revenue, like yours, gets none of it: no announcement day, no borrowed names, nothing between the buyer and your work itself. The substance is yours; the signals were never built.
Closing the gap means building them: one company everywhere a buyer looks, evidence offered before it's asked for, and a story that holds at every point a buyer checks it.
What closing the gap involves
Begin with what's working. If buyers choose you when they know you and pass when they don't, the product and the delivery are most likely doing their jobs. The problem then lives upstream, in what a buyer can see before they ever talk to you, and that's a narrower, cheaper problem than the one it feels like.
Brand work itself is unglamorous. Deciding what your technology company stands for and writing it down in words your team will use. Rebuilding how your brand looks and reads so the proposal, the website and the product stop resembling three different firms. Putting the evidence a cautious buyer wants where they'll find it without asking. And because impressions move slowly and invisibly, doing all of it on the record: a reading of how your buyer sees your brand taken before the work starts, and the same reading once the work has had time to be judged, so whether the gap closed is something you can check.
It's possible to do this work well and still lose the next deal to the firm that looks bigger, because buyers re-judge brands slowly; a branding firm promising you'll seem established by next quarter has a timetable for delivering your files and none for your buyers changing their minds. What you can fairly expect to watch is staged.
Your new identity
the changes to the brand assets, visible in months.
Your buyer's view
It moves slowly and on no fixed month, which is why it's measured and never assumed.
The commercial effect
Building from around month six, the point in Binet and Field's B2B study where brand building takes over as the main driver of growth.
One test you can run this week
One test costs nothing and takes a day. Send your homepage and your most recent proposal to a potential buyer who doesn't know your technology company, and ask one question: does this read like an established firm? If the answer comes back smaller and newer than you are, you've just measured the gap yourself.
Where to start
You've measured the gap once. The next question is where it lives: in the strategy your brand stands on, or in how your buyer sees your brand today. Brandian has a way in for each, and if the face your brand shows already matches your substance, the findings say so and point to where the losses do live.
The Platform Inspection examines your brand strategy and states where it's sound, where it's failing, and what closing the gap would take. It doesn't close it: the corrections are ranked and put in writing, and who makes them is your decision.
The Brand Record is the other door in: the measure of how your buyer sees your brand today, which everything that follows is checked against. Whichever you buy first, its full price comes off the first instalment of the service or solution that includes it, inside six months, so testing the ground costs nothing extra.
£3,500
£4,000
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