Episode #222: Selling Before Meeting The Buyer

We all understand the importance of a brand. Brands are a short form description of long term reliability and perceived trust, both based on solid evidence. Every business has a brand. You might be thinking that your company is too small and insignificant to have a brand. Yet you deal with your own staff and for them, the business is a brand because of their experience with you as their employer. Suppliers serve you and for them you are a brand, based on how you treat them. There will be buyers and they have already positioned your brand, based on the way you partner with them to serve their interests.

Our company brand does the selling for us, up to a certain point. As salespeople though we have our own brands. Clients buy us first, then they buy our widget. They are putting their trust in our reliability to provide them with the right solutions to help their business. Salespeople from our firms, past and present, collectively establish the brand in the market, based on their individual service capabilities for buyers.

Today, social media has given every salesperson an amplification opportunity never before available in commercial history. This is a double edged sword. If the service is poor or problematic, then bad news travels far and fast. Once upon a time, if you didn’t do a good job for the client, maybe 10 people might know about it. Today, thousands can know about it instantly.

Let me illustrate. A businessman in Tokyo, whom I had known for many years and would occasionally meet at networking events, had his personal brand trashed. There was some dispute with the President of another company, who said they were not paid for a service they had provided to his company. This information appeared on LinkedIn and was in my newsfeed. At that moment, I realised how powerful social media was. I did a search on this guy and what a Pandora’s Box of woe and trouble that released. Based on what I read, I would never do business with him. If anyone checks him out beforehand, I doubt they will proceed with him, based on what they find online.

As a salesperson, when a client does a search on you, what will they find? I don’t necessarily mean high crimes and misdemeanours. Is what is being presented to the world, showing your personal brand in the best light? There is no doubt that clients today will validate who we are on social media and proactively use internet searches. Knowing this, are we taking a firm stance to control the narrative? What photos of you are up there?

I took a look at my own photos, which Facebook has divined for my photo collection. They are about 95% business oriented, with a couple of karate related photos there. Nothing untoward or embarrassing. Now this is by choice. I know I must have control of my personal brand and so whatever goes up on social media from my side, has to be pre-approved by me, as a conscious decision every time I post. When I do a search on Google on myself, again the results are almost exclusively business related content, with images and content congruent with the brand I have built. Again, this is no accident and please take a look at it for yourself.

Buyers will check your social media and your search information. Do we want them finding extraneous stuff that doesn’t add any value to our brand? No. We want a full frontal assault, aiming for sensory overload, on what a tremendous professional we are. Even better, we want to pack the medium with content marketing value. Post your own articles on social media about aspects of the market or the product, that bolster your reputation for reliability and trust. Don’t just hijack someone else’s article and piggy back on their content, by writing some glib one liner and then reposting their content under your name as a curator of content. Post you own content, that you own and which makes people aware that you are an expert in your field of expertise. Remember, we have the tools for amplification ready to rumble. The more of your own content you pump into the system, the more prominent it becomes and the more likely that this will occupy the attention of the buyer, when they are making a cursory investigation of your social media presence.

We want the buyer to buy our brand. We need to determine what that brand is and that means we need to exercise precise control over what is available about us out there in internet land. When we are being checked out by the buyer, we need to know in advance what they are going to find. We want it to be powerfully positive. Let’s control the sale with the buyer, from even before they have a chance to meet us. We own our own story, but it only makes sense if we decide what that story is and where it appears. Let’s get busy doing an audit on who we are in the social media and internet search world. If we don’t like what we find, then we have to change that and change it pronto. The internet, like rust, never sleeps, so let’s become intentional about our personal brand development.