103: Create Brand Ambassadors from Within | Jennefer Pursifull

Gut + Science

Jennefer Pursifull is the VP of Marketing and Sales at Medxcel, where she believes in the importance of collaboration. At Medxcel, Marketing and HR join forces to increase overall engagement of both clients and employees. She knows when you have employees who are proud of the company, telling their stories is the best way to spread a company’s brand. In this episode, you’ll learn how she builds brand ambassadors by equipping people to tell their stories .

Truth You Can Act On

1. Align Marketing and HR

Supporting Quote

Jennefer Pursifull: “We have a research side of our marketing group, and they really do the customer relationship survey. They oversee our service, transactional surveys on customer satisfaction, and then they do this piece of associate engagement research. And in the last year we have developed an associate index that we combined with our relationship and service, transactional service strategy to create a health index for our remote sites. Our associates do their job out in hospitals and healthcare locations, and so they're dispersed across the country. And one of the things that our HR team really struggled with was understanding the environment within each one of those sites. We now have this index, and we come together with HR, and we look at the index, how the site is doing. We look at the data within that site, and then HR really focuses on kind of the HR basics--the training and leadership development skills, understanding what needs to be supported from technical education and leadership education--and our team looks at what are those drivers of engagement and how do we support the connections between the leaders? And what's around the pieces that will make the greatest impact on how our associates build pride and build their confidence and their support of the organization?”

2. Do Research First

Supporting Quote

Jennefer Pursifull: “I think anytime you start something new, you really need to start with the data. And that's what we did. We started with the research on our customer side, then we added the research on understanding our associates engagement level, and then we use the analytics it takes to bring those two together. So start with the data. Once you have the data that will guide you, watch what your next steps are. Where do you need to focus to build your associate engagement levels? And that's just working on the assumption that the associates engagement level, as it goes up, move towards a brand ambassador position. And we have absolutely seen that result once that associate engagement level is high and your associates are just naturally telling the story of your organization and how they fit and work within this organization.”

3. Equip Employees to Be Brand Ambassadors

Supporting Quote

Jennefer Pursifull: “There are a lot of internal ways that we tell those stories, and as you tell them, you actually encourage people to share their stories. But then our brand team very much uses these stories externally, and we use them in social media. We use them in identifying sometimes a story that will turn into an actual case study in one of our accounts where we can focus on a successful service delivery partnership with a customer. We use it on our website, and we use it when we're out speaking and those opportunities really to share the stories that our associates have shared with us.”

Book Recommendations

• Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker

Sponsor

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