This edition of The Brand Equation is brought to you by the Villain Team of executive-level strategists, writers, researchers, creatives, and category experts who bring both precision and pace to their craft.
At a glance
What we're focused on: The translation tax: The brand problem that's being hidden as a sales problem
What that gap breaks: Longer sales cycles, higher CAC, low conversion, and low retention
Where to look first: Sales - the answer is in what is happening in the pipeline
What we're reading:
Bain & LinkedIn B2B Institute, The Science of Buyability: on why 80% of B2B buyers choose from a shortlist formed before the sales process begins
BCG, Building Lasting Brand Equity in the Age of AI: on why cutting brand investment costs $1.92 for every $1 saved today
From the Villain desk
There's one version of your company the market already knows: the public version based on perception. Then, there’s the company you actually are now, and there’s also the company you’re building toward.
Those three things are rarely in sync. Vision is always ahead of where the business currently operates. Internal reality is always catching up to the last strategic shift. And external perception is almost always behind both, frozen at whatever version of the company made the strongest impression first.
That gap isn't a failure of execution. It's the natural state of any company moving fast enough to matter. The problem is when nobody names it, because everyone inside the building has already moved on. Leadership is operating from the new reality. The team is somewhere between the old playbooks and the new direction. And the market is still working off the version of you they encountered last year, or three years ago, or whenever they first heard your name.
We call that gap the translation tax.
The translation tax
You can see the translation tax in your sales motion if you know where to look. Have AI analyze patterns across your sales call recordings to determine if your brand value is unclear to the customer. Look for:
How many ways the rep has to explain what you do and how you’re different
If the buyer needs to be corrected from a company description that showed up in their Claude search
How long it takes until they get to the actual value proposition
If the first few minutes of most calls are spent correcting what the buyer assumed going in, that's the translation tax running in the background of your sales motion. It shows up in the sales cycle length whether you've named it or not.
This is sales’ problem, but it’s not a sales problem. It's a brand problem that you’re asking sales to solve. It shows up as longer sales cycles, higher CAC, lower conversion on first calls, and retention risk when customers bought into an outdated version of what you do.
The instinct when sales cycles stretch is to fix sales with enablement. Better decks, more training, and tighter talk tracks can help. But if buyers are arriving with the wrong picture of your company, no amount of enablement closes that gap. The problem lies way upstream of the sales motion.
Companies close this gap when they treat brand as operating infrastructure. They build one story that travels through a buying committee, across functions that weren't in the room when the strategy was set, into markets where no one has heard of them yet. When brand is doing its job, a rep walks into a conversation and quickly confirms what the buyer already believes before pivoting to tackle their objections. Then, the conversation can move quickly from consideration to evaluation and purchase.
Closing the gap
It’s not quite a rebrand, but closing the gap means getting the market’s understanding of your business to match the business you’ve actually built. And the story you tell has to work without you in the room.
ServiceNow did exactly that. Rather than staying in the IT ticketing category, they told one consistent story across every department until buyers stopped thinking of them as a tool and started thinking of them as something businesses ran on. When brand campaigns did that work upfront — priming the market before demand campaigns even started — ServiceNow saw an estimated 69% lift in conversion. That investment in brand storytelling ensured that the right messaging was reaching the right people at the right time. The demand campaigns were more effective with a 50% lift in engagement, a 27% reduction in cost-per-click, and a sales team able to focus on a higher volume of high-intent buyers.
The same principle applies whether you're building awareness from scratch or correcting a dated perception. Make the market's understanding of your business match the business you've actually built. When that happens, performance spend works differently (and better) because the brand has already done the heavy lifting.
What this looks like in practice
💸 The translation tax is measurable
Pull data from your sales calls and look at time-to-value in discovery calls. Talk to your sales team about how much education is required before a prospect is ready to evaluate. Then look at your CAC by segment, because the gap between segments where you're known and segments where you aren't is usually where the tax is heaviest.
💬 Message portability is the test
After one conversation with your team, can a prospect explain what you do to someone else in their organization without you in the room? Not word for word, but close enough that the right person would want to take the meeting. If they can't, the story is too complicated.
💰 Brand investment changes what buyers cost to close
When the story is working before a rep gets on the call, acquisition costs drop. That's the number that moves the CFO conversation, not awareness scores or brand equity.
🧭 Internal alignment comes first
External perception won't shift until the story is consistent inside the business. If leadership is still describing the company differently across rooms, the market reflects that back. Across engagements with companies in the $500M–$3B range, brand infrastructure investment consistently lands between $800K and $3M. For companies solving for brand debt, a significant perception shift, or a restructured spend mix, that range moves to $1.5M–$6M+ for the first 12–24 months, and then normalizes as the foundation holds. This is a pattern we've seen hold across the companies where the work actually moved the needle.
Let’s accelerate your sales cycle
If this is a problem you're living with, know that it's one we solve for clients regularly. You don't need a full rebrand to fill the brand gap and accelerate your sales cycles — just a team that helps you create fast cohesion, differentiation, and conversion within your narrative.
If you’re interested in exploring a narrative intensive for your brand, schedule time here.
