“You are who Google says you are” is a quote from Timbo Reid, the host of the “Small Business Big Marketing” podcast which I follow. His point is people check us out before they meet us, using search engines like Google. In sales, buyers will also peruse our company website, search us out on Google and probably look us up on YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. What are they going to find there? Are we in photos on Facebook, doing something stupid or embarassing, fully fueled by copious amounts of alcohol? Are we conscious enough of how our personal brand is being perceived? Have we got business enemies who are posting damming claims about how we didn’t pay them or how we ripped them off.
Our lives in sales today are open books. We can’t miss the point that we need to control what gets written in the pages of that book. If you have Facebook posts that are not consistent with the professional image you want to portray, then delete them all. If it is really bad, delete the whole thing and start again. When we look at the photos of you in your profile page, is it you with a straw hat and a cocktail in hand, in some sand and surf setting, rather than you in a suit? Is your LinkedIn profile some pathetic, indulgent job resume? Are you raging against the other political party on Twitter, upsetting the other fifty percent of the population, including half of your buyers?
Personal branding in sales is gold. Before we even get to have the meeting with the client, we want to create an image in their mind of someone who is serious, trustworthy, reliable, expert, credible, friendly and easy to work with. Unfortunately, today, this can create itself and morph into something we don’t want to project to clients, unless we step in and take control of our public image. The rule in sales is to avoid divisive subjects like politics and religion. This is obvious, but we may have firm views on these things and our public record is there for our clients to see. We may be losing business opportunities because of our very personally held, but widely and very publicly broadcast ideas on these subjects.
Have you done an audit on yourself lately? Do a search on your own name, using a number of popular search engines and see what it throws up. Take a good look at your Facebook and LinkedIn pages and see what you are projecting to the world about you, as a potential business partner for buyers.
It shouldn’t just be from a defensive posture. What can you do to project expert authority to buyers, by what you present on social media etc. Post blogs about your area of expertise, offering good insight and advice to buyers of your product or service. It doesn't have to be hundreds of blogs, but it should also not be a barren wasteland of nothing. Extended blogs can become articles which may be suitable for publication in magazines. These can get picked up in your Google search and they add to your personal brand as an authority in this area. You can push the articles out through your weekly newsletter to clients or through your social media. If you produce enough blogs, these may become an eBook or a hard copy book. Again your expert authority is being highlighted and you are going to be seen as an expert in your field.
You may not like to write or maybe you are not very good at it. You can always record what you want to say, get a transcript of it and work on editing that. If you need to, there are plenty of editors and ghost writers available to help you polish it up. I remember seeing an article written by a fellow I know and it was very good. I was surprised because he never seemed that articulate. I found out later I knew the guy who had ghost written it for him. Today, ChatGPT may help you with the article or book plan. It doesn't matter. People don’t care that much, they take what they see in front of them and it is either good or it isn’t. You are still making your key points and it all supports your personal branding.
You can also use audio for podcasting. This is not for the faint hearted because once you start, you have to be committed to keep going. You also have to release episodes with reliable regularity. You can’t tell the client on one hand that you are a reliable supplier and then have show episodes released at crazy intervals, that show zero ability to be consistent. Not good.
You may prefer video and that is cheap and easy today, compared to years ago, when you needed lots of equipment, a camera crew, a sound crew, video editors etc. Today you can broadcast using various live streaming platforms and have no crew and no editing. Simply buy a device holder that screws into a tripod, buy an external microphone and set you phone or iPad and just hit record. You may not even bother to edit out the bits of you pushing the start and stop button or get someone else to push them for you.
Video is good because it shows you in action and attracts more trust. We can see your eyes and read your body language, to gauge if we can trust you or not, before we bother to meet you. It allows us to demonstrate our expertise on a given subject and add value to others in the same industry. If you know a bit about editing or have access to editing help, you can add an intro and an outro to brand yourself even better. You can also inject slides into the video to show graphs or text to support what you are saying. If you are really crazy, you can be like me and start your own TV show as an expert on a topic on YouTube and produce episodes every week for years.
We are seizing control of our public image and we are stuffing it full of expert authority. We know we are going to be found anyway, but we are proactively deciding just what will be found. We are assembling content in various forms that appeal to buyers. Some like to read text, others like to listen to audio and others want to see us on video. We marshal all of the social media available, our email list and enlist the cooperation of others who will share our content to get the greatest bang for the buck. A little bit of planning goes a long way to setting up the sales meeting and selling the client before we even meet.
