7 signs you might need a rebrand (three signs you don't) : PART 2

In part one we looked at what a rebrand is and the first two signs you might see that could indicated you need a rebrand. In this part we are going to explore the next three signs.

3. Deals are taking longer to close

You've noticed it's taking longer to close deals. Your team might cite market conditions, or slower decision-making from risk-averse buyers. Both are likely to be true. But there's a structural reason too, and a clear brand is one of the few levers you have against it.

Buying committees have expanded. Depending on the study, the typical complex B2B purchase now involves somewhere between six and 16 stakeholders [3]. Make no mistake, schools and MATs are complex buyers, and risk-averse ones too.

Much of the decision is also made before a rep is invited in. Buyers have never had so many ways to research and evaluate a product before they engage with your company. In a 6sense survey of 4,000 B2B buyers, 95% of purchases went to a vendor that was on the buyer's shortlist from day one, before any sales conversation [4].

Put those together, and your brand has two jobs. First, it has to get you onto a shortlist drawn up before you even know the buyer is in the market. Second, once you're on it, it has to give your champion one story they can easily carry to the committee members your rep will never meet.

That second job is where the brand does its most important work. Your champion sells on your behalf to colleagues who are rightly sceptical of headline claims, and a clear, consistent story is how they influence them. Those sceptical colleagues will be doing their own research too, online and off. A strong, consistent brand means whatever they find backs up what your champion is telling them.

4. Cross-selling is harder than it should be

If you sell more than one product and your customers rarely buy the second, the instinct is to blame awareness: they simply don't know the other products exist. And there will be some truth to that. But often the real problem is that there's no connecting logic between the things you sell.

There's a big difference between a company that sells five unrelated products and a company that solves one problem five ways. The first is a catalogue. The second is a platform, and platforms cross-sell themselves, because the second purchase is the obvious next step. The next product makes the first product more valuable. In education especially, where a school or trust is buying into a relationship rather than a transaction, the absence of a connecting narrative is expensive.

If your own account managers can't articulate how your product suite fits together, they won't be able to cross-sell well either. A good rebrand that establishes the connecting product logic fixes the cross-sales pitch.

Creating a clear connected message to facilitate cross-sell was one of the commercial objectives behind the rebrand at Faria Education Group.

When I joined the group to lead the Brand and Product Marketing teams, I arrived at a company that had grown successfully through acquisition. It had a wide breadth of products, each having its own sales team, customer success team, branding, and websites. Bt nothing connected. Customers would buy one product and have no idea the rest of the portfolio existed. Many of them weren’t even aware that Faria was the parent company, even though it had been around for nearly 20 years! Customers' brand affiliation was very much at the individual product level.

The Faria product suite before and after the rebrand.

Tying it together to improve cross-selling and, as a result, increase average account value was a key commercial goal of the rebrand. The connecting logic we landed on was the learner journey: the products, taken together, supported it end to end, from the application process, through the curriculum and management system, to co-curricular provision, and out into analytics. Each product built on the one before it, and the whole became far more useful than the sum of the parts.

Connected data flows were where that logic paid off. Instead of the same information being re-entered across disconnected systems, it moved with the learner, a significant benefit to schools, and a real headache-reducer. That was the story: not five products to buy, but one learner journey supported end to end. Read the the full Faria Rebrand case study here.

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5. Your win rate is slipping

Win rate is a key signal. What's even more useful is the pattern of the losses.

Start with who you’re losing to. Losing to competitors you used to beat is often brand erosion: the market's perception of you has slipped relative to theirs, even if your product hasn't.

Then count the deals that end in no decision. Matthew Dixon and Ted McKenna analysed 2.5 million sales conversations and found that 40–60% of qualified deals are lost to indecision, not to a competitor [5]. More than half of those buyers wanted to change. They stalled because they were afraid of getting it wrong.

That fear grows with the deal size. Bigger deals frequently involve more people, and every extra person is another chance for someone to prefer the safe option, or no option at all. In education, whoever recommends a purchase has to justify it to a head, governors or a trust board. If you're the premium choice, an unclear brand makes that recommendation even harder to defend.

If you'd like to find out if your company might need a rebrand, or not, you can check for the signs using our interactive Rebrand Diganotstic

Read Part One

Notes:

3. "Buying groups are more diverse than ever, ranging from five to 16 people", Delainey Kirkwood, Principal, Research in the Gartner Sales Practice. Gartner press release, "Gartner

Sales Survey Finds 74% of B2B Buyer Teams Demonstrate 'Unhealthy Conflict' During The Decision Process," 7 May 2025. Link: https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2025-05-07-gartner-sales-survey-finds-74-percent-of-b2b-buyer-teams-demonstrate-unhealthy-conflict-during-the-decision-process 

4. 6sense's 2025 B2B Buyer Experience Report, a survey of nearly 4,000 B2B buyers across North America, EMEA and APAC showed that buyers choose from one of the four vendors on their Day One Shortlist 95% of the time  So the 95% is about where the winner comes from, not how far through the process buyers are. The same report adds that the vendor buyers prefer before engaging with sellers still wins 80% of deals. 

5. Dixon, M. and McKenna, T. (2022) The JOLT Effect: How High Performers Overcome Customer Indecision. Portfolio. Of the deals lost to no decision, 44% came from preferring the status quo and 56% from indecision rooted in risk or fear of failure. That's where "more than half" comes from. The JOLT Effect