We expect our Sales teams to convert opportunities and drive revenue.
We rely on our Talent Acquisition teams to attract top-tier professionals who can accelerate growth.
These are reasonable expectations — and core to any organization’s forward momentum.
However, one critical factor often goes unexamined:
The role your company’s digital reputation plays in shaping both sales conversations and talent decisions.
The Emerging Challenge
Over the past few years, this issue has surfaced repeatedly across industries:
- Prospective clients frequently encounter online reviews — and form silent reservations even before a commercial dialogue begins.
- High-potential leads often stall inexplicably after initial meetings, despite the sales team’s best efforts.
- Promising candidates — especially in revenue-generating roles — review Glassdoor ratings, social media comments, or news mentions, and quietly withdraw from the hiring process.
- Meanwhile, internal pressure continues to mount — for Sales to meet quotas and for TA to fulfill ambitious hiring plans.
The Core Reality
What’s important to recognize is that neither team is directly responsible for how those reviews came to exist.
Many stem from past delivery gaps, cultural inconsistencies, incentive-related friction, or fragmented internal processes.
And yet, it is these frontline teams — those driving business development and talent engagement — who bear the brunt of the reputational impact.
Often, leadership remains unaware of the reputational drift.
Whether due to bandwidth constraints or hierarchical opacity, these signals rarely make it to the boardroom — and when they do, they’re sometimes dismissed as anecdotal or misinterpreted as performance justification.
The New Business Reality
In today’s digitally transparent world, online perception is a core part of the decision-making process — for both buyers and talent.
No amount of internal strategy, culture decks, or mission statements can fully offset the erosion caused by negative online sentiment.
Leadership must ensure that external perception aligns with internal intent.
This is not merely a matter of branding — it is a matter of operational enablement.
If we fail to recognize and address this disconnect, we risk unintentionally impairing the very teams we rely on for growth.
A Simple Leadership Exercise
I encourage every leader reading this to take 15 minutes and review your company’s presence on platforms like Google Reviews, Glassdoor, and LinkedIn — through the lens of a prospective customer or candidate.
You may be surprised at what you discover.
More importantly, you’ll be better positioned to lead proactively, rather than reactively.