What’s Your Company Voice?

When you speak or write are you funny, reserved, precise, thoughtful, quick, professional, humorous, soft? Do you think about how you are heard by others? How do others perceive how you project yourself? Take a minute to think about this. Now, do you ever think about how a company has its own voice too?

A company may not be a singular person with a real voice or a pair of hands to write, but a company does evoke a voice to its customers. This voice is very important when thinking about how a current or potential customer will view or perceive a company.

For example, here at CodeScience we took the time to invest in defining our voice. We work in an industry flooded with plenty of other companies with the same intent as us – build applications on the Salesforce platform. So, how do we communicate who we are and what sets us apart? We want to ensure that anytime a potential client or new employee interacts with our website or other marketing materials, they’re hearing a consistent voice.

So how do you develop a voice?

Work with a writer. Period. Work with someone who is a wordsmith – that lives and breathes this stuff. Then brainstorm, throw around past experiences, stories, client successes – everything that has made the company who it is. That will begin to bubble up repetitive visions and words that make up the voice. Through our voice discovery, the following ideas and words came to fruition:

• Casual, smart, fun, light, friendly, crisp BUT a bit of attitude is welcome

• Company culture is KING

• We’re like a family

• We purposefully and thoughtfully created a company that mixes equal parts precision and play

• Love challenges

It was clear that the company culture is a huge asset to CodeScience and portraying that in a friendly but also clever way was vital. CodeScience builds really complex applications – how can that be made human?

From this Discovery came our Manifesto

At CodeScience, we believe that it’s possible to deliver a superior product and exceptional support while finding space to let our big, bright personalities and wicked senses of humor shine through. Coding is fun! And work should be fun too!

All of us here are lifelong learners whose curiosity drives our innovation and allows us to blaze new trails with creative solutions. We are passionate about what we do and dedicated to going above and beyond for our clients. But to do that, first we have to go above and beyond for each other. Our company culture is built on teamwork, empathy and respect. We collaborate, we have each other’s backs, and we support one another, not because it’s good for business, but because it’s the right thing to do.

We emphatically believe that the values we hold and our commitment to them are what make our work and our team truly special.

Next our tag lines came to life:

• Your SaaS is in our hands.

• We crack the code on thriving SasS businesses.

• We don’t cross our fingers and hope our code passes security review—we guarantee it will.

• Our Product Development Organization (PDO) practice is like a cheetah with a jetpack.

• We love difficult problems.

Now, we have a descriptive voice and tone being perceived by others and our own staff. Now do you find yourself beginning to think about what your voice looks like? You’ve heard how we sound and what we have to say – now you are probably wondering what we look like.

That’s coming up in a future post…