“Regardless of age, regardless of position, regardless of the business we happen to be in, all of us need to understand the importance of branding. We are CEOs of our own companies: Me Inc. To be in business today, our most important job is to be head marketer for the brand called You.”
–Tom Peters
Like no time before, the profession of selling has changed. There have been predictions that the salesperson would disappear because of the onslaught of E-sellers and the access to information at the touch of your smartphone. That salespeople add unnecessary costs to the products and slow down the process from decision to acquisition.
While Google makes sure an E-store that matches your query is at every turn with their “click here to buy now” buttons that ruin your view and more information on any product or category than can ever be consumed, the role of the salesperson is more important than ever. Strategy replaces tactics and knowledge coupled with honesty is the new baseline for performance. The problem is you need to let people know about you long before they walk through your front door.
Today your potential customers are bombarded with advertising of all kinds, and much of that advertising is directed at them with impersonal emails, banner ads, pop-up ads and even phantom text messages. Not to mention the clients themselves will visit numerous websites in search of product information and to investigate the social exposure of the company and the people they may want to work with, all while scanning thousands of images in search of the “right look.”
Standing out from this never ending barrage of non-permission marketing and self-guided searching requires that you begin building a following and to start promoting your skills, your knowledge and your great reputation. It means you must start building Brand You!
Building a brand is no longer relegated to the marketing team, corporate boardroom strategy or as an adjunct position of the IT department. Branding is now an individual act, which impacts sales performance and customer acquisition more than it ever has before.
Salespeople in a retail store don’t have a personal marketing budget. What they do have are unlimited resources to accomplish the personal brand building that is needed to make an impression in today’s marketplace. We have our projects, experiences and the daily customer interactions, when shared can be used as the basis for building your brand.
One of the facets of building brand the professional salesperson must embrace are the popular social platforms, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest. Also be on the lookout for Periscope & Meerkat that feature live peer to peer video broadcasting.
To reap the branding benefits of the social platforms, to build your reputation and to promote your sales persona, requires work, dedication and effort. You must take the time to invest in educating yourself in each of the platforms operation. There are no quick fixes or shortcuts, you must do the work!
Before you read further, please make a personal commitment to these ideas. Social branding will not take the place of sales skills. It aids bringing the people to you so you can use your skills.
The results of building a brand will take time to quantify, it will take time to build up a following and then one day it will hit you that, “wow it works.” Your goal is to spread the word of what you do, who you do it for and how you do it. Simply, it is sharing the results of great customer interactions, cool products and ideas, including the posting of in-process and completed pictures of the projects you’re working on. While building your brand do not lose your individuality, this is about your experiences, your projects and your customers. When you assertively re-post articles of others you build their brand and say to your followers, “I believe in this 100%”. When you use the phrase, “I believe in this 100%” as a benchmark, your posts will be yours and the ones you share will reflect you exactly. Your posts must promote that you are different than the run of the mill lighting salesperson/designer. Being different stands out over being better when building your brand.
To be successful building your personal brand using social media platforms you be disciplined and have determination. Schedule time to post on the various platforms to create the habit and to strengthen your skills. As you become comfortable with the process and the nuances of the various platforms, you can start to incorporate “freestyle posting.”
How do you start?
Learn how to use your smartphone to get the pictures you need and to connect with your social platforms.
I think Instagram is a great place to begin. You can post pictures of your store, products and project quickly and easily from your phone. These posts can link directly to your Facebook and Twitter accounts. One post to Instagram lets you cover three platforms simultaneously!
Snap a picture, write 10-25 words about it and you’re on your way to building your brand.
A word on Facebook and Twitter. You may feel uncomfortable that this will blend your work life and your personal life. It does and it should! People want to deal with people like them and people they hold in high esteem. These two platforms give the world a human view of who you are in your personal life and what you represent. But that’s about rapport and another article.
LinkedIn is mandatory. If you are not on LinkedIn get there and complete all the steps in creating your profile. It may take more than one session to finish, just do it and do it first. In my opinion if your career is in sales then LinkedIn is the living portfolio of your business life accomplishments. LinkedIn is a way you can have a personal webpage without the cost or hassle of maintaining a site and unlike some other blogging sites, you share this stage with only business professionals. There is a section called PULSE that lets you post content to it like a blog. LinkedIn can also be connected with other social platforms to get the most from your posts on PULSE.
Blogging about your work or ideas lets you express your passion of purpose. The ability to share that passion with your customers is invaluable. This skill alone will separate you from the crowd. There is no time to be timid about sharing what you know and what you can do for your customer.
In fact, you must be a persistent self-promoter of the skills and knowledge you possess and how that passion, skill and knowledge will benefit your customer.
Remember when sharing your passion it relates to your skills, your customer and their experience. There is a fine line between exuding confidence combined with passion and a boastful ego. It is an interaction that is more about the project, product or customer than it is about you! Share your knowledge and skills whenever you can. The selfless act of sharing passionately is more than supplying the information that is requested from you, it is about the giving of your knowledge freely; this sharing helps build the memory of brand you.
The more active you are in building your brand, the quicker you will build your reputation as being a respected resource for your clients. When you share your knowledge and your time and it has been the experience of your current and previous customers that you are a professional, you will build a reputation as a resource that is reliable and precise. Your trusted customers will come to count on your support, input and recommendations. As those customer’s confidence builds, you will find that you will become their go to person when help is needed. As the relationship bond with your customer strengthens, you will be able to introduce new ideas that will be welcomed and they will refer you to friends and colleagues.
Earlier freestyle posting was mentioned and it is just what the name implies, you post as close to real time as possible. You see a great design or application, shoot a picture and post. Did you just get in the latest and greatest chandelier, snap a picture and post. Do you get the idea?
Last word on using the social platforms. Do not buy into “auto posting” it is a thin veil that is easily seen through. The posts while applicable to your industry, are generic and broad, never personal. Your brand should be about you, your customers and the experiences you share.
Building your brand is also face to face, human to human. Your brand is more than posting gigs of data to a website, it is about the human to human contact. Without that human aspect of our connections the E-tailers would dominate the selling space. When there is no human connection to the store, the product or the process then it is so easy to “click to buy now.” Remember Facebook shares your human side with the world.
From Dr. Steven Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, we learn that when we make deposits in the emotional bank account of others, the benefit returns to us in multiples of the original act. Freely sharing ourselves, our knowledge and putting out the extra effort are the deposits we can make with our customers when building our own brand?
This goes way beyond the ever touted and respected thank you card and cheerful greeting . Knowing your customer as the people they are; they are confident that you have their backs, you know their likes and dislikes, hobbies and interests. Demonstrate to them through your personal actions that they are a valued member of your circle.
When building your brand, logic has something to do with creating those relationships, but emotion plays a much bigger part of that experience. As customers become more transactional loyalty is decreasing. We must step up to increase the investment we make and build those emotional deposits with our customers. The result in making true emotional deposits it is likely that your customer becomes your friend, at a minimum a strong acquaintance and we try harder for our friends. We can be deeply impacted by making those emotional deposits with others. It changes us, how we see people as humans and as a part of our lives and it moves us beyond transactional clerks into relational sales professionals.
You may be thinking does this work? It sure does! I will share a real life account I have witnessed. Mike was new to selling and that may have been his greatest asset. He applied all the aspects of building his brand, staying connected to his small following with cards and notes to start. Email and internet based social sites were not in his bag of tricks. His desire to succeed in his new career of sales overpowered his lack of knowledge of the social media. Mike posted simply at first, pictures of new items for sale and public recognition of his customer interactions. His customer relationship status increased, his customers were loyal. The importance of building personal brand came to me when friends of previous customers would contact Mike directly, some even texted him, others would travel over 250 miles just to work with him. A year after his start in sales Mike knows that people buy from people they like and those they connect with.
This article is an introduction to some of the actions it takes to build your brand and there are many other nuances to learn and fine tuning that can occur on an individual or enterprise level. This final thought bears repeating; make no mistake this is work, work you must commit to, and work that is beyond what is in your job description. It will require the development of skills you may not have yet. Good news is that instead of wasting time learning some manipulative sales techniques, educate yourself on reaching out and touching current and future clients in a human way.
Living the selling life since 1970
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