How do you communicate sales culture to a sales team?

With a short, visual format, such as a playbook, that explains the culture through examples and characters rather than lists of principles. Ideally it accompanies the team through the whole cycle, from attraction to assessment and onboarding.

Why use characters in internal communications?

Because they turn abstract concepts into stories that are easy to follow and remember. A character gives the culture a voice and a tone, and if it is born from the brand itself, the team recognises and adopts it more easily.

SamsungCase study

Samsung Smart Thinking: a sales culture playbook starring SAM and SUNG

Samsung wanted its culture communication to be memorable, understandable and entertaining. Smart Thinking delivered with a playbook starring two characters, SAM and SUNG, to explain the new commercial DNA.

ClientSamsung
FormatCulture playbook

The challenge

The challenge was to make the company’s culture communication memorable, understandable and entertaining. Specifically, there was a new commercial DNA, “SMART thinking”, that the sales force had to understand and make their own.

Sales teams are a demanding audience for internal communications. They have little time, lots of pressure to deliver results and very low tolerance for long documents. A new commercial DNA explained as a list of principles risks being read once and never opened again. On top of that, the culture had to accompany people at different moments of their relationship with the company, from attraction to assessment and onboarding, which called for a format able to explain a lot simply and with a tone that invited people to keep reading.

The idea

The answer was a playbook to make the new “SMART thinking” commercial DNA easy to understand, told through SAM and SUNG, two characters in charge of attraction, assessment and onboarding, supporting the development of the Smart Academy sales force.

The characters are the key. Splitting the brand name in two, SAM and SUNG, is an instant nod any employee gets and remembers. And giving the culture faces and voices turns abstract principles into conversations between characters, which are much easier to follow. Each takes on a role in the talent cycle, which organises the content naturally. The work included the art direction, the copywriting, the building of the book and the creation of the characters.

What we did

Playbook on the “SMART thinking” commercial DNA
Creation of the characters SAM and SUNG
Content for attraction, assessment and onboarding
Playbook copywriting
Art direction
Support for developing the Smart Academy sales force

Key takeaways (expert view)

If your sales culture is hard to explain, give it a face: well-chosen characters make it understandable and memorable.

Characters born from the brand

SAM and SUNG come quite literally from the company’s name. It is a device that gives instant identity and needs no explanation. When the characters in an internal campaign are born from the brand itself, the team adopts them as part of the family. Venues and event suppliers can apply the idea with mascots or voices drawn from their name or history.

Culture told as a conversation

A written principle gets read; a character explaining it gets listened to. Turning the commercial DNA into dialogues or situations starring characters makes the content more digestible for an audience short on time. It is a very useful format for any brand with sales or customer service teams, where clarity is everything.

One thread for the whole talent cycle

Attraction, assessment and onboarding are often communicated with disconnected pieces. Using the same characters across all three phases gives continuity and makes the culture feel the same from first contact. For events companies, which bring in new staff frequently, a shared narrative thread speeds up integration considerably.

Services involved

→Communications agency for the events industry →Live campaigns →All services