You are a Sales Funnel

Good morning and welcome to March!

For some of us, this is the final month in Q1 - good luck to you and let’s pray the sales gods accelerate all of your meetings / deals to close before month-end!

Whether you’ve been a subscriber since day one or have just recently joined, it’s important to remember the two main drivers behind this newsletter:

1. Improve the skills we need now (cold outreach)

2. Prepare for the future of sales (community & personal branding)

Since August, I’ve primarily focused on the cold outreach piece - and now it’s time to start tying together the community and personal branding aspect.

We’ll start with this simple idea 👇

You are a Sales Funnel. Think like one.

Consider your prospect’s journey: receives email > receives phone call > Linkedin request > email > phone call > Linkedin message > phone call > email …. so on and so forth.

Each time you attempt to connect with your prospect, you’re building their perception of your personal brand. Which is becoming increasingly important and in my opinion, there isn’t a future in which a personal brand becomes any less important.

If your prospect likes the way you carry yourself online, across any and all mediums, they’re much more likely to become engaged with your organization than if they were to come across a digital ad campaign on Linkedin or Google.

Because of course - people connect with the people that are tied to businesses, they don’t connect with businesses directly.

After a prospect receives your email, depending on the quality of the message - they’ll click on your CTA, or your company website in your signature. Or, if you have your Linkedin profile in your signature - they might go to your personal Linkedin, and from there they might check out your company’s Linkedin page, then visit the website, and so on and so forth.

You are an Individual Sales Funnel. You are an Individual Demand Gen / Lead Gen Channel. You are the most targeted marketing your company has to offer.

Think about the different roads your prospect can take when they receive your outreach. As always, your goal is to build trust.

Once they trust you, they’ll begin considering your company. It truly is all about the individual and the connection you establish. Because let’s be honest, outside of a few really unique organization’s - most of us aren’t offering anything that different from our competitors.

It’s all about positioning. And now more than ever, it’s all about positioning yourself as someone the prospect wants to interact and build a relationship with.

So, how do you begin building a personal brand? Start by answering a few questions:

1. What industry am I truly most interested in?

If you’re in the right spot - great. Start sharing your unique perspective on the trends and activities in your industry. A lot of folks from Chili Piper do a great job of this. They’re building a personal brand and trust with other sales leaders by talking about the life of sales on Linkedin.

1. How do I communicate most comfortably?

For me, it’s longer form writing like this newsletter. Others are great on video, some like short form writing on Twitter or Linkedin. Be honest with yourself on this one, it’s critical.

1. What are my prospects learning about?

Scan sites like Linkedin, Twitter, Reddit, and other forums to see what it is that your prospect are learning and curious about. Assuming you’re in an industry you’re truly passionate about, you can develop a unique perspective and begin broadcasting it.

There are a lot of things to consider when it comes to building a personal brand and community. The questions above are to get you thinking about what it means and how it can be done.

If you are serious about building your personal brand and you want to do it on Linkedin, I suggest you check out Justin Welsh's Linkedin Operating System. In this course, he gives you the step-by-step blueprint for how he scaled his Linkedin following to more than 150,000 followers.

Even though he’s an Entrepreneur you can apply his frameworks, concepts, and tactics to your personal branding regardless of your employment status.

Final Note: In the near future, the most successful salespeople will be the ones with personal brands and communities. Point. Blank. Period. Sales and Personal Branding are forever intertwined. Start building your community now.