Understanding brand disconnect in B2B SaaS

Have you stopped directing your prospects to your website because you no longer feel like it represents your business or product?

If so, you may be experiencing a brand disconnect.

We hear these problems from prospects and clients all the time.

• You may appear like a five-person operation when you’re actually 50, and your prospects have no sense of your scale, brand kudos, or business maturity. Yes, you sell software, but your expertise, culture, and differentiators are nowhere to be seen.
• Your marketplace is global, but your messaging feels like you are regional or national.
• Although your website targets prospects poorly, you must attract top-tier talent with domain expertise, integration partners, and investors. However, your growth trajectory, brand story, employer values, and culture are nowhere to be found.
• Your customer success and support messaging is vague at best or, worse, non-existent.
• Your SDRs and AEs treat your messaging like the Wild West. They don’t reinforce key messages in the day-to-day and make up their own sales decks in PowerPoint or, worse, Google Slides.
• Downward pressure from macroeconomic factors, slashed software budgets, and increasing competition makes it harder to stand out. Your unique value proposition is diluted, and this is your key differentiator.
• When your product and team are strong, and customers see you as integral to their operations, but your brand fails to reflect that, that’s the disconnect.

We know—it keeps you up at night.

How brand disconnect impacts business growth

The brand disconnect for Azur Technology

When we first met Azur Technology, they faced similar pain points.

At 18 months old, their story began eight years prior when Azur Underwriting launched an MGA for high-net-worth insurance products. After being acquired by Aviva, Azur Technology separated from the underwriting business following a management buyout in 2023. Growing swiftly to 45 people, they struggled to convey themselves as a technology-first company with insurance expertise.

Azur Technology values long-term partnerships and trust, and it wanted to emphasise the importance of being an ‘MGA’s insider’ rather than just another tech provider.

Another one of their challenges was finding the balance between not wanting to look like a one-size-fits-all SaaS offering or a consultancy building bespoke software solutions.

Their product is a set of flexible, configurable insurance building blocks to meet the unique needs of each MGA client, and they wanted to balance the credibility and scale of the business versus the boutique, personalised service.

Azur Technology wanted to convey the message of being a trusted, dynamic technology partner with deep insurance expertise. Striking the right balance in their brand messaging and fixing the disconnect was vital.

These insights came from our deep-dive discovery process.

Finding your North Star and metrics for success

We take all our clients through the same discovery process. Whether launching a new brand, refining product messaging, or aligning a scale-up’s ICP, we bring clarity to their journey.

In branding, we walk the customer journey forward. For a design system or product, we reverse it. Everything we do is grounded in context.

Our client onboarding process

In our discovery workshops, we want to learn about your customers, products, services, sales process and go-to-market strategy to bring your vision to life.

Three individual workshops are held with different internal stakeholders.

• Brand — what is your mission and vision?
  • Interviews with the C-suite
• Product — what problem do you solve and for whom?
  • Interviews with product and engineering teams
• Customer journey — how do you connect with prospects, convert leads, sweep customers off their feet and keep them coming back for more?
  • Interviews with sales, marketing and customer success teams
• Externally, we often interview your customers. Effective design requires a comprehensive understanding of your business, customers, and competitive advantages.

These workshops are invaluable, often inspiring clients to re-think their offerings as we force them to think like their customer for a day.

Azur Technology’s North Star

After six hours of workshops, we identified what Azur Technology needed to align their brand with their vision.

Our response to Azur Technology’s brand disconnect

• Build credibility, trust and dynamism through brand and messaging.
• Amplify the Azur value proposition and brand story – built by MGAs for MGAs.
• Showcase business scale, culture, and diversity to attract talent and clients.
• Tell the product story, highlighting industry expertise.
• Use customer testimonials, logos and case studies to build credibility and trust.
• Weave a narrative of how Azur partners with their clients.
• Ensure consistent messaging across the customer journey.

Creating a platform for growth

In our discovery process, top-down thinking leads to actionable briefs for visual identity, brand architecture, brand voice, UX, and messaging.

Azur Technology’s modular and configurable software allows MGAs to go to market quickly with a foundational set of insurance building blocks, MGA Connect Core and scale their operations without increasing headcount using modules from MGA Connect Plus.

Our brand response was to reinforce MGA Connect’s modularity, amplify the product hierarchy, and remove barriers to adoption through clear product messaging.

With a growth target of 50% year-on-year, Azur Technology needed tools for customer acquisition. We provided a comprehensive brand package, including guidelines, a new website, and marketing materials to support US and UK growth.

Identify and resolve brand disconnects to accelerate growth

Brand disconnects are common in fast-growing tech firms, and the signs are clear. Talk to Kohde about plugging the gap and accelerating growth.