CHAPTER 6

Creating a Magnetic Personal Brand

The subject of personal branding has received a tremendous amount of attention as we continue to evolve into the world of digital buying and selling. You might be asking yourself, “What exactly is a personal brand, and why in the world would I need one?” Put simply, your personal brand is an outward representation of who you are. It’s the available information that other people use to understand what you’re all about. And in a digital world, your brand is out there for everyone to easily see.

The Importance of a Digital Personal Brand

Now, the truth is that you are far more than could ever possibly be expressed on social media, your website, or other internet destinations. But unless you operate in a world where the only impression you ever make with your customers is via live video, telephone, or face-to-face meetings, your digital brand plays a huge role in communicating the truths about you. And even if you do connect live, a lot of your prospects will “check you out” online before, during, or after you actually meet.

As far as your customers, would-be employers, or social media followers are concerned, what they see when they type your name into Google, look at your LinkedIn profile, or scroll through your Instagram posts is all the evidence they have to make judgments about who you are and what defines you. That’s quite sobering to many of us who don’t want to be judged solely by what people read and watch on the internet. Unfortunately, that’s the way the world works today.

In a sense, you already have a digital personal brand. The question is this: Have you taken proactive control of what people see when they look in your direction? If not, then the impression that is formed in your customer’s mind will happen somewhat by chance.

Despite the digitization of so much of modern business communication, people show a growing desire to engage with, buy from, and work for people and companies that are more “human.” A digital personal brand that reveals who you are as a person gives people a chance to learn enough about you that they can come to know, like, and trust you whether they ever get a chance to meet you or not.

With the right approach, you can build a personal brand that communicates more than just your contact information and your capabilities. Your brand should give people a lens into your character, what matters to you, and what you believe in.

I like to think about it like this . . .

A strong personal brand is more than just a way for people to identify you. It’s a way for people to identify with you!

Whether you are trying to attract employers, employees, customers, followers, or are just trying to expand your professional network, the goal is to make some sort of a connection with people through your brand. You might want your brand to help people arrive at conclusions such as:

•   This person has a tremendous amount of experience in my industry.

•   This person isn’t just out to make a buck; they seem to really love what they do.

•   Wow! They’re a lot like me. Or better yet, “They really ‘get’ me!”

•   I like this person’s attitude and outlook on life.

•   This person has a life outside of work. I like that!

•   I can totally relate to their beliefs, their struggles, or their aspirations.

As a sales professional, or especially as a business owner, you are the face of your company. A strong personal brand enables you to stand out from the crowd. Your company may seem just like dozens of others, but there is no one else quite like you! Your brand can communicate what makes you unique and different from others in your space. It enables you to foster e-relationships and literally build bonds with prospective buyers and business partners asynchronously.

A personal brand is often even more effective for attracting and retaining customers than a corporate brand. This has actually been true forever—long before YouTube and social media were around. By and large, people don’t trust companies. They trust the people who work in companies. Any trust they have in a company is based on their belief that the company is committed to hiring and employing trustworthy people that will treat them fairly, follow through on commitments, and do the right thing.

Personal branding is not only a way to attract prospective clients; it’s becoming a major factor in how to position yourself for promotion and new opportunities within your own company or others. The traits that make you trustworthy and appealing to clients are the exact same traits that make you an attractive candidate for employment or advancement. Research has shown that over 70 percent of hiring managers use social media like Facebook and LinkedIn as part of the vetting and hiring process.¹ It gives people visibility beyond what is communicated in a résumé, an email, or a videoconference.

In this chapter, I want to share what I call the Nine Essential Elements of a Magnetic Personal Brand. These represent the components, if you will, of constructing a brand with digital gravity. A great brand pulls people in, makes them want to stay, and keeps them coming back for more.

As we go, assess yourself in these nine areas. Think about where you are strong and maybe where you could use a little improvement. But also ask yourself this question: “What am I doing—or what can I do—to let the world know where I stand in each of these areas?” When it comes to building relationships digitally, most of what people will ever know about you is what you intentionally enable them to see.

As we step into building your personal brand, it’s important to note that the goal is not to try to appear as someone whom you think your customers would like to buy from or follow. What customers, employers, and followers respond to today is authenticity.

When it comes to digital relationships, we’ve all become a bit suspicious of the person who looks a little too perfect online. People are inundated and have become fatigued with the highly polished expert who promises hacks, shortcuts, and easy fixes to all their problems. There is something refreshing about an individual who shows up as the imperfect person they actually are.

That doesn’t mean we want to be unprofessional, but . . .

In today’s digital marketplace, being real is more attractive than trying to be impressive.

Many leading companies who realize the incredible leverage of creating a personal brand are empowering and even assisting their salespeople to develop their own magnetism online. Unfortunately, some organizations actually discourage the practice. To the leaders of those companies I pose the following question: If you’ll pay your account executive six figures or more in base salary and commissions to be the face of your company in front of customers, why can’t you trust them to upload a video to YouTube or write a post on LinkedIn? If the answer is, “They don’t know how,” then teach them! Or hire someone who can.

The Nine Essential Elements of a Magnetic Personal Brand

Now, let’s dig into what it takes to build a brand that people not only recognize but also want to identify themselves with. I’ve put together a collection of nine elements that make a personal brand magnetic. They are:

1.   Knowledge and Expertise

2.   A Heart for Serving Others

3.   A Compelling Promise

4.   A Relatable Personal Story

5.   The Courage to Step Out

6.   Credibility and Authority

7.   A Platform with Reach

8.   Consistent Communication

9.   Genuine Irresistibility

Do you know what I love about this list? You have the opportunity to develop or improve in each of these. None of them are beyond you! Yes, some of them will take time and effort. I certainly will never say that building a powerful personal brand is quick and easy. You’ll probably spend the rest of your career developing your knowledge, expanding your credibility, and learning to communicate more consistently with your market. But regardless of where you’re at right now, you can grow in each of these areas. Let’s talk about how.

1. Knowledge and Expertise

Many of the most effective sales professionals and business owners are those who possess deep knowledge in their field of expertise. To lay the foundation of building an attractive brand, dedicate yourself to becoming an expert at what you do. That doesn’t mean you have to become the world’s most famous thought leader. But you need to know enough that other people want to listen—and will maybe even pay to listen!

Here’s a solid truth worth taking hold of . . .

If you want to become well known, you have to know something, or know how to do something, that other people want to know or do!

Yes, you need to know your business, your industry, the products you sell, and your competition. But you become much more valuable to your customer when you know their business, their industry, and their competition and show them how to improve in one way or another. Invest your energy learning exactly how your customers can use your products and services to increase their revenue, reduce their costs, and improve the utilization of their invested assets. Become an expert in helping your customer accomplish measurable business goals and objectives.

As a corporate sales pro, you can become an expert in the products and services you sell—your B. But, if you have technical resources and support personnel available, you’re actually better off leaving that to your sales engineer or solutions architect. What you want to become an expert in is diagnosing and coming up with solutions to your customers’ business problems. Learn how to uncover your customer’s current state (Point A) and create a vision of a desired future state (Point C) that you can help them attain. Then bring in the technical experts to show the customer how you can help.

As you develop your expertise, showcase it online in all the ways that we spoke about in the previous chapter and many more that we’ll talk about going forward. If you don’t possess all the knowledge your customers need, then curate it from other sources and serve it up to them in an easy-to-digest way so they can understand it and put it to use.

If you’re not the industry authority in your field yet, that’s no problem. Just remember this . . .

It’s not the person who knows the most, but the person who most effectively shares what they know, that becomes the expert that others turn to when they need advice.

It comes down to marketing your knowledge and expertise. If you want people to find you, you have to give them plenty of good stuff to find.

The late, great Zig Ziglar was one of the most captivating authors and speakers of the twentieth century. Anyone who ever saw him speak will say that they’ll never forget it. One of the hallmarks of his speaking and writing was that he didn’t conduct much of his own empirical research. What made his talks so interesting was how he synthesized information from other sources, drew logical conclusions from it, and then offered simple ways to apply it to everyday life. He always referenced the sources that he used, and that gave his work even more credibility.

You can’t be a leading expert on everything all at once. Focus on a niche. Let’s say you are a consultant with extensive knowledge in manufacturing. If that’s you, you are among an insanely large field of competitors. But if you can focus just on the healthcare industry, you narrow things down substantially. If you wanted to specialize even further, you could focus on implantable device manufacturing in the very early phases of development, which might involve rapid prototyping and creating proofs of concept. You could potentially become a leading voice in that particular space much more readily.

If you don’t have all the knowledge and experience needed to stand out in your market, then make the time to learn it. It might take years to become a leading authority, but you can learn enough to be a great resource to your prospective customers in 60 days. Get started now by simply reading several of the latest articles and watching a couple dozen recent YouTube videos that your customers would read and watch if they had time. You’ll soon know enough to write some interesting introductory emails and start some engaging conversations. Then build your broader expertise over time.

2. A Heart for Serving Others

The second ingredient needed for a magnetic personal brand, which is surely as important as the first, is a heart for serving others. Knowledge alone is not nearly as compelling as knowledge in the hands of someone who has a genuine interest in helping other people. Multiple studies over the years have shown that we tend to trust others whom we believe have our best interests at heart more than qualified experts with whom we have no relationship.² This is true even when our only interaction with them is via the written word, images, audio, or video.

When people believe that you intend to use your knowledge for the purpose of helping others, your brand begins to take on a whole different meaning. Knowledge used for a higher purpose is exceptionally appealing because . . .

People may notice when they hear what you can do, but what really makes them pay attention and respond is understanding why you do it.

As you seek to let others know who you are, it’s important to communicate why you do what you do. People want to know the purpose behind your actions and intentions. When your prospective customers can see, hear, and feel that you live and breathe to help people just like them overcome the very challenges they are faced with, you become the person they will look to for guidance. If they believe you have the knowledge to help them and the heart to serve, you are well on your way to earning not just a customer but also a raving fan.

We all possess a certain level of discernment—to varying degrees of course—but people can usually tell when you are there to help them versus there to help yourself. They can smell it a mile away!

That’s why I always like to say . . .

Just start serving your customer and helping them in every way you know how. Somehow the selling sort of takes care of itself.

One person who I think epitomizes this philosophy is Graham Cochrane (www.grahamcochrane.com), a very popular YouTube entrepreneur and influencer whose expertise is helping people create knowledge-based online businesses. Even the tagline he repeats at the beginning of every one of his videos speaks to his mission: “I’m here to help you learn how to work less and live, and give, more.” Who wouldn’t want some of that?

I happened to be watching one of Graham’s recent videos, and when it ended, YouTube recommended the next video related to that topic. It featured a very well-spoken young woman who opened her video by saying, “I don’t know about you, but I’m here to make money, build my financial future, and create long-term security for my family.” Graham was focused on me. She was focused on her. Which one would you be more likely to listen to and want to learn from?

People can sense our heart by the language that we use, our interest in them, our responsiveness, our generosity to freely share what we know, and also by how we define success. Are you driven by your own pursuit of success? Or are you led by a purpose of serving others? What’s the difference, you ask?

Here’s the way I look at it . . .

Success is about you getting something. Purpose is about you giving something to others! Choose purpose!

People might admire (more likely envy) you for your success and trappings. But what people are drawn to is a brand with a purpose of helping others. That’s who we want to follow. That’s who we want to learn from. That’s who we’ll take a phone call from or reach out to when we’re ready to further explore the possibilities.

3. A Compelling Promise

“So, what are you selling?” Have you ever been asked that? I actually love that question because it gives me the chance to answer with my favorite little comeback line: “I’m selling revenue and profit margin. Are you interested in either of those?” Remember back in Chapter 2 when we talked about the difference between Point B and Point C? To answer the question, “What are you selling?” we have to make a decision: Are we selling a solution (B), or are we selling the promise of a result (C)?

So much of modern sales and marketing revolves around who we are and what we do. That is packaged up into a “message” that gets broadcast via every imaginable channel. But there is a big difference between a message and a promise. A message is a statement about what we do and who we do it for. A promise, on the other hand, is a story that places your customer at the center of a journey. It has an origin (Point A) and destination (Point C). More importantly, it emphasizes that the customer is the one who makes the journey. The difference seems subtle, but it is actually profound! Within the promise, customers can clearly see the problem they get to solve and the result they get to achieve. You and I are just there to help guide them along the way.

Put more simply . . .

A message is about what you do. Your promise is about what your customer can do with your help.

A promise is far more interesting and compelling, isn’t it? Let’s see how this might look and sound in practice.

Here’s an example of a marketing message:

We help millennial sales professionals prepare for their financial future.

This is an example of a promise:

You stepped into the sales profession because you have a heart for helping your customers achieve their business goals and you want to maximize your own personal income. If you’re good, your sales income will provide a nice lifestyle, but it may never enable you to retire with enough years left to really enjoy what you’ve worked so hard for. What you do with your sales income determines how you build wealth, security, and financial independence. I will show you how!

As you build your brand, learn to tell stories about what’s possible for your customers to achieve with your help. To do this well, you have to consider the role or the persona of the person to whom you’d like to communicate your promise. Let’s take another example right out of our flagship training course, Selling to C-Level and VP-Level Executives™.

Let’s say you sell a SaaS (software as a service) solution that improves communications between your clients and their customers by enabling them to reach a customer service rep through a variety of mediums, including phone, email, text, chat, etc. That is an interesting set of capabilities, but what’s the promise? We have to remember that business leaders, including those who would have to approve the purchase of such a system, don’t buy products and services; they buy what I call “movements to measures.” Let me explain.

Every executive or business leader is placed in charge of one or more measures or KPIs (key performance indicators) that represent the outcomes and results he or she is responsible for managing. These business measures not only reflect the effectiveness of the team they lead but are often the scorecard by which their own job performance is judged. To make our solutions relevant at the executive level, we have to learn to translate what we do into a promise of an impact on—or a movement in—one or more of the measures that business leader is responsible for.

Here’s a great way to think about it . . .

To translate your capabilities into a compelling promise, you have to answer this question: “Which needle on which dial can be moved in what direction by how much over what period of time?”

In relation to the example earlier, rather than talking only about the capabilities of your SaaS solution, tell a story that contains a core promise something like this:

Based on what our clients have been able to do, your call center could reduce customer churn by up to 12 percent while increasing average recurring revenue per customer by over 21 percent in as little as 12 months.

A photo of you in front of your yacht shows me you’ve made a lot of money. That can be motivating! It shows me that a lot of people must have bought something from you. That’s social proof. But it doesn’t necessarily persuade me that you can help me solve the problem I have right now nor help me achieve the goals I’m responsible for achieving going forward. As you build your brand, make sure you continue to communicate more than just what you do or what you have achieved. Make sure to help your customer understand the promise of what they can achieve by working with you.

4. A Relatable Personal Story

One of the most powerful aspects of your personal brand is your own personal story. Nothing engages a reader or a viewer quite like seeing how you found your way from where you once were to where you are today. This is especially useful if you are in the business of teaching other people how to do what you’ve already done. You can weave stories into your brand that include some of these kinds of experiences:

•   Where you started out

•   The challenges you were experiencing

•   The negative impact these changes were having on your career and your life

•   What sparked a change in your trajectory

•   What you set out to do

•   Some of the setbacks you experienced along the way

•   How you overcame those hurdles

•   What you were ultimately able to accomplish

•   How your life has changed since then

All of these woven together actually makes for a beautiful story, much like the script of a Hollywood movie. Almost everybody who reads your story will be able to relate because all of us are probably in one of these stages of our own journey right now!

Some of the most compelling personal brands are built around taking your followers with you on your personal voyage by literally chronicling your own day-to-day adventures. People love to watch you overcome the setbacks and experience the breakthroughs. This is something that all of us can do regardless of where we are in our journey because as soon as we arrive at the destination, the whole cycle starts over again.

If you sell a product or a service—as opposed to your own advice—you can tell your own story, including details like these:

•   How you found yourself in the industry that you are in now

•   In what kind of a role you started out

•   How you advanced to the seat you sit in today

•   What you learned along the way

•   The way you work with your clients today

•   What personally drives you in terms of serving your clients

You can also share examples from your customers’ stories as well (without sharing names):

•   Challenges your clients are currently facing

•   The impact on their business or on them personally

•   The kinds of initiatives your clients are undertaking

•   Some of the setbacks they experienced and how they overcame them

•   What they were ultimately able to accomplish and how their life has changed

People love to understand the human story behind whatever you offer. It really helps illuminate your purpose, like we talked about earlier. Look at how providing just a few words about the backstory and the purpose changes this next simple example from a business description into an inspirational calling:

I was a stressed-out attorney working 15 hours a day. I never saw my kids. That’s why I founded my _______________ business to help other attorneys simplify _______________ , take control of _______________ , and get their life back!

Now that’s a story with purpose! It has an origin, a destination, and a promise! As you build, think about ways you can bring stories about your journey, or even your day-to-day life, into your brand. People who will become your followers and hopefully your customers will love the chance to get to know the real you.

5. The Courage to Step Out

As simple as it sounds, the thing that keeps many people from building their own personal brand is that they are afraid to step out and say, “Here I am!” I completely get it. When I started my first direct sales job in college, I would often be physically ill before making phone calls or walking into a presentation. I did it anyway! You may not feel you have everything you need to build a brand. Start anyway!

The one thing that has held me back all my life, more than anything else, is being paralyzed by constantly comparing myself to others. Log onto any social media platform and start looking at the glamorous lifestyle and daily accomplishments of the big shot content creators. It can easily seem like you’ll never be as impressive as they are. But have you ever noticed that most of them are not at all in the same business that you’re in? It’s not even a valid comparison. Most of the rock stars on social media are rock stars on social media because they are in the business of teaching other people how to become rock stars on social media!

Forget all that! There will always be people ahead of you on this brand-building journey. But there are also many more who are behind or will soon come along behind. The best time to get started is right now. Here are a few things that have helped me not only in building my brand but also in just about any undertaking:

Get clarity on what you want to accomplish. Prioritize and choose one or two things you want to get done this week or even this month. Maybe it’s to start a YouTube channel or set up a content development plan for the next couple of weeks. Until you define what you need to do next, you’ll burn up all your energy “thinking” about what to do instead of doing it.

Find some other people to learn from. A person who’s done what you want to do will be the first one to encourage you and even help you! Watch some YouTube videos or find a helpful blog post. Reach out to other content creators and ask questions. Learn from someone who’s done it and ideally is still doing it!

Take baby steps! Get at least a rough vision of what you want to do and take one step in that direction every single day. Don’t overthink your five-year strategic plan. Instead, just start taking some steps. Your vision and your plan will crystalize as you go. Seek guidance along the way, but get moving in a direction.

Stepping into your new role as a globally recognized thought leader can be terrifying! Fortunately, you’ll never have to do that. You can’t! You have to start small and work your way up. You don’t have to do it all at once, but you have to do something. And the next little step is probably something quite easy to do if you just make the time and muster up the courage to do it.

Perhaps you could find an article that you think your ideal customer would benefit from reading. Break it down and turn it into the “5 Things Every _______________ Needs to Know About _______________ .” Then, post one of those five ideas on LinkedIn every morning for the next week. Make sure to give credit to the original author. Always credit your original source! Maybe tag them in your post and put a link to the original article in the comments. Take what you learn and apply it to real-world challenges your customers are faced with. You can do that!

6. Credibility and Authority

Comedian Eddie Cantor is often credited with the quip, “It takes 20 years to make an overnight success.” Building a strong personal brand does not take 20 years, but it’s going to take more than 20 minutes. Just imagine where you could be if you invested 20 minutes a day for the next 12 months!

Even the fastest growing influencers on social media have invested at least a year—more often two to three years—to attain a significant level of distinction. And many have invested more years than that to attract a massive following. But you can start adding followers and building your list of email subscribers the instant you start adding value to your prospective customer’s day.

Establishing credibility, however, is something entirely different than just attracting a lot of social followers. Oh, a big following can help, of course. I met one gentleman who had amassed over a million followers on Twitter. That has gained him a fair amount of attention as an “influencer.” It even landed him a few speaking engagements to talk about “How to get a million followers on Twitter.” But the value to him day-to-day is little more than a few thousand likes on whatever dance video or cat meme he chooses to post.

Unless you’re in the business of teaching people how to attract followers on social media, the kind of credibility and authority that makes you a sought-after expert in your field is not established by gaining a large social following. Having a lot of followers simply means more people get to see what you post. Credibility and authority come in other ways:

Become a Professionally Published Author

Nothing builds credibility and authority like being professionally published in newspapers, in trade magazines, and by major book publishers. Self-publishing is an option. It’s a great way to get your ideas to market fast, print whatever you want, and keep more of the profit. But to build your credibility, you’ll want to appear on some well-known labels with familiar logos.

You have to work your way up in publishing one step at a time. You can start by writing blog posts, articles on LinkedIn, or starting an email newsletter. Next, approach your local newspaper or business journal and write a few articles. After that, graduate to a magazine or two that your typical prospects might read. As you go, you can build a portfolio of “clippings” that you can present as you seek to publish at each next level. If you’d like a copy of a free mini-guide I created called How to Get Professionally Published, you can download it at: www.salesexcellence.com/handbook.

As I started building my brand, I published articles in various business journals all over the country even while I was still working in my corporate sales role. You should have seen the look on my prospective clients’ faces when I handed an IT executive an article reprint that I published in the Washington Business Journal called “Four Reasons Why Enterprise IT Projects Fail. “I wasn’t just another sales rep after that! If I did it, why can’t you?

Become a Podcast, Video Show, or TV Host or Guest

Getting our own show on NBC might be a stretch for most of us, but anybody can start a podcast. I’d suggest exploring being a guest on a few podcasts or live video shows first. Hosting a podcast is a great way to stay in front of a large number of prospective clients on a regular basis. But building a substantial listener base is a serious undertaking, especially with thousands of other new podcasts launching every single month!

The voice of the host is heard on every show, but the star—the one who is showcased as the expert—is the guest! Couple that with the fact that most podcast hosts are actively looking for guests, and it suddenly makes a lot of sense. Plus, you get in front of different audiences every single time as opposed to the same audience over and over again!

Here’s a really important point to remember . . .

The best way to be invited to be a guest on podcasts, online shows, and even television is to become a professionally published author.

Every host wants to feature authors because authors are perceived to have authority! Notice the same root word there? Ha!

Embrace the Art of Public Speaking

We’ve all probably heard that most people are more afraid of public speaking than they are of dying! I honestly can’t relate at this point. I started giving presentations for a living when I was 22 years old and have spoken in front of more than 2,000 audiences since then.

People have asked me how I deal with nerves when presenting in front of thousands. Honestly, I never even notice it anymore. But when I started, I nearly passed out when I stepped up front to speak. What I can tell you is this: public speaking will build your confidence like nothing else in the world. When you can stand up in front a group of people and make sense, everything else just seems easy by comparison.

Public speaking is also a great way to enhance your résumé and build new relationships. Do you want to make a lot of great new acquaintances at the chamber of commerce? Volunteer to speak. Everyone will suddenly know you! Do you want to maximize your exposure at a trade conference? Earn your way (or pay your way) to speak at the conference. The possibilities are endless if you are willing to learn how to sell yourself as a speaker.

I started learning the trade at Toastmasters (www.toastmasters.org) and later got involved in the National Speakers Association (www.nsaspeaker.org). It truly changed my life! When you get around other speakers, you’ll find they are not that different from you. They might be a little ahead on the journey, but don’t let that stop you from starting now. Speak for free! Video everything you do and share those clips as you work your way up to landing paid engagements. Public speaking is one of the best ways to build your professional credibility fast!

7. A Platform with Reach

If you’re going to develop a brand that has gravity and influence, people have to hear about you. They have to know you exist. Before the era of social media, this was an incredibly expensive and time-consuming undertaking. Now, anybody can open an account on TikTok (one of the more recent social platforms taking the world by storm), and if they happen to get lucky, go viral in a matter of hours. But posting one video that gets a million views doesn’t necessarily make you influential or attract a flock of new paying customers. What you need is one or more platforms that you can use to get your story and your promise out there for people to see consistently over a significant period of time.

As you have heard and will continue to hear throughout this book, I am a true fanatic about LinkedIn for more reasons than I can even list. I can trace over eight million dollars in revenue to my company, Sales Excellence, to my personal inbound and outbound efforts on LinkedIn. You can use it in so many different ways: make a text or video post, publish an article, start a newsletter, network with other people with similar interests, or do outbound outreach for prospecting. The list goes on and on. But LinkedIn is not the only way to create or reach an audience.

You may choose YouTube or Facebook or Instagram or TikTok. The key is to pick a platform where you think your prospects hang out and start feeding into that community. Remember to lead with your heart for serving others. Don’t go into it just looking for leads. That kind of an approach will probably backfire on you. People will sense it and probably be repulsed. Your service to others is what people are interested in. People who engage with you online are thinking, “What can you teach me that I don’t already know?” as opposed to, “What can you sell me?”

One good way to select the right platform is to look for some other people similar to you and watch what they are already doing. If you see a couple of other people in a similar space to yours doing well on YouTube, you could deduce that there is obviously an audience for that kind of expertise on that platform. Investing your energy there could be a great choice because if those other people have all of those followers and that much engagement, an appetite obviously exists. There’s a good chance that one brand will never be able to fully satiate that demand. There might be room for you, too.

Alternatively, you might observe that even though creators like you have done really well developing and serving a community on Facebook, for example, no one is really talking about your topic on TikTok yet. You could be one of the first!

If you are a local Realtor and you want to sink deep roots into a community, start writing for the local newspaper or speaking at the local chamber of commerce, Rotary Club, or other civic organization. Teach people smart ways of investing in real estate or give them tips on various forms of financing. Perhaps you could show people how to properly “stage” their home so it will sell faster and at a higher price. Start putting real estate advice in local area Facebook groups. Note: please don’t just start posting your latest listings. Share insights, not ads! And always adhere to the group guidelines or you might be summarily kicked out of the group.

I want to encourage you to look beyond just social. Like we talked about in Chapter 5 on the digital selling engine, you’ll want to combine a variety of different communication mechanisms, such as an email newsletter, a blog, or text updates, that enable you to reach a lot of people and make a positive contribution to their lives over time. Combine that with regular publishing, appearing as a guest on a variety of podcasts or online shows, and a bit of public speaking, and you could have a nearly limitless overall platform strategy.

8. Consistent Communication

If you want people to know you, appreciate you, and remember you, they need to hear from you regularly! We’ve all heard the old saying “out of sight, out of mind.” This has never been truer than today because there are so many voices from so many sources competing for your customers’ attention.

As I’ve already mentioned, consistency is everything, especially in social media! Well, maybe it’s not everything. You also have to have quality content that speaks to your readers and that they can identify with. You have to provide insight and advice that is more valuable than the other posts they could take the time to read each day. But you can have all of that, and—without consistent communication and engagement—people simply will stop seeing your material and your followers may never hear from you again.

Consistent communication comes down to having a plan and some good old-fashioned discipline. Choose a frequency for publishing and stick with it. Maybe you could set a goal to share your story and your promise by . . .

•   Posting on LinkedIn three times a week

•   Posting a video on YouTube once a week

•   Being a podcast guest once a month

•   Publishing an article once a quarter

Start small. Develop a plan you have confidence in and can actually execute. Build over time. But whatever you do, do it very, very consistently.

9. Genuine Irresistibility

The ninth and last element of a magnetic personal brand is probably the most powerful of all. That’s why I saved it for last! It actually applies to every aspect of developing your reputation and your brand, whether digital or otherwise. I call this ingredient genuine irresistibility. And it’s not so much about doing. It’s actually more about being.

We’re going to talk about the traits of the type of person that other people want to work with and follow. These attributes reveal who you really are. They are an expression of character. These are the characteristics that everybody craves in a business partner, in a leader, and in a friend.

It is said that a tree is known by its fruit. These nine attributes, listed below, represent the fruit produced by a life well lived. This kind of fruit is irresistible. It’s what everybody wants.

Whether you are a sales professional trying to attract prospective clients, an industry expert trying to build a following, or a business leader trying to foster a culture that others want to be a part of, these are the things that will make you absolutely magnetic.

Here are the nine qualities of irresistibility. Along with each of these I offer a few synonyms that help define each trait and the kinds of behavior that accompanies it. As you read through this list, think about which words best identify you and which words other people would use to describe you:

Love: appreciation, endearment, admiration

Joy: enthusiasm, positivity, optimism

Peace: composure, serenity, contentment

Patience: tolerance, even temperament, being slow to anger

Generosity: kindness, compassion, helpfulness

Integrity: goodness, honesty, consistency

Dependability: faithfulness, loyalty, trustworthiness

Humanity: gentleness, humility, respect

Self-mastery: self-control, discipline, restraint

Let’s explore these one at a time:

Love

I grew up fishing the lakes and streams of southwestern Oregon alongside a brilliant and funny kid named Roger Courville. At that time, neither of us could have known that he would one day become a highly sought-after author, speaker, and a leading authority on how to run effective online meetings and conferences.

One morning a few years ago, Roger was being interviewed on the radio when the host asked a very interesting question: “How can a presenter connect with an audience that they can’t see?” Roger never missed a beat. He said, “You love them!” Wow! What an incredible perspective. I truly believe this is also the ultimate strategy for how to build a brand and a tribe of people who want to follow you: You love them!

Roger says, “Your audience knows if you love them by the preparation you put into what you share, the way you tailor your presentation to the real-world situations they’re faced with, and even the nature of the questions you ask. Part of it cannot be explained in observable behavior. Somehow people can just tell. When you really love them, they’ll know it.”

I’ve recently started speaking on the subject of love as it relates to sales, leadership, and organizational culture. As I begin the opening session, I have the audience break out into small groups to discuss this question: “What does love look like to your customers, to your coworkers, and to the people you oversee? How can people know that you love them?” What I hear are phrases like showing appreciation, frequent communication, responsiveness, and making yourself available.

If you love your customers, you are constantly seeking to understand what they are trying to accomplish and the challenges they face. You are always looking for solutions to their problems and ways to help them achieve their dreams. If you love your employees, you exhibit patience and humanity toward them. You hold people accountable, but you treat them with dignity and respect and as a person first.

Love is the missing ingredient in dysfunctional corporate cultures, broken families, and even in the boardroom—where we are all supposed to be on the same team. If you want to be the kind of person that other people are drawn to, be willing to express more love and appreciation for everyone around you. Love changes everything. Love never fails!

Joy

Who among us is not attracted to joy? Everybody loves to be around people who embody enthusiasm and a zest for life. Joy that abounds breeds optimism in others. When you embrace joy, people will want to hang around you on the chance that some of that exuberance might rub off on them!

One person I greatly admire for this trait is Jackie Hermes (www.jackiehermes.com), founder and CEO of Accelity. Jackie is a marketing genius and has developed a tremendous following on LinkedIn and other social platforms. What is so refreshing about her is that she tells us her own story of struggles and triumphs every single day on LinkedIn. She talks about the real fears and insecurities so many entrepreneurs face. She tells it like it is, but she shows up with a great attitude, and her enthusiasm is absolutely contagious.

If you want more joy in your life, get around people who embrace joy—even if you can only associate with them digitally.

I’ve found that . . .

Joy goes hand-in-hand with gratitude and hope. So, if you want to find joy, take inventory of what you have to be grateful for today and the hope you have for the future.

Can’t we all be thankful for life, for our family and friends, and for the opportunity to work and serve others? There are probably dozens of other things that will reveal themselves if we quiet our mind long enough to give gratefulness a voice in our lives. If you can find any gratitude for where you are right now and any hope for what lies ahead, joy won’t be far behind.

Peace

In the dog-eat-dog, hustle-centric world we live in, finding someone who operates in peace is like a breath of fresh air! If you can embrace peace, other people will want some of that peace, too. When you have peace, you’ll be unflappable in the face of adversity. You’ll be comfortable in your own skin. You’ll find contentment for where you are even as you continuously reach higher. As you foster more peace in your life, you’ll find less to be envious or jealous about in others.

Many of us simply need to make peace with our past. Some of us have done things or been through things for which we’re still carrying shame, bitterness, or resentment. But as tough as it might have been—and for some of us it’s been really rough—it doesn’t have to continue to define who we are forever. One major step is forgiving the people who hurt us whether it was intentional or not. Holding on to bitterness is toxic. It hurts you far more than it hurts the person you hold a grudge against. Some of us need to forgive ourselves! Shame will rob you of joy and literally steal your future. Choosing forgiveness will change your life. It has certainly changed mine more than once!

Peace comes when you realize that you don’t have anything to prove to anybody. You are already accepted and whole whether it feels like it or not. You are enough! And anybody or anything that tells you that you’re not is lying to you and must cease to have a voice in your life. You don’t have to keep striving to be complete. It’s possible that you are right where you need to be for a time such as this.

Patience

One of my biggest struggles in life has been a lack of patience. I seriously doubt if I’m alone. We get so fixated on the way we think life ought to be that we forget to live life today! We sometimes have a hard time living in the present and accepting the world as it is. We want what we want, and we want it right now! The problem is that the rest of the world doesn’t always align itself with our timeline. Ha!

The dictionary defines patience as, “the capacity to accept or tolerate delay, trouble, or suffering without getting angry or upset.”³ In other words, patience is about tolerance. It involves tolerating other people’s opinions or behavior. This seems to be getting tougher and tougher for our society every day.

Anger, which would be the opposite of peace, has become a way of life for so many of us. We get angry with other people because of their political stance or even when they hold up traffic. Many of us need to let that go and simply accept the delays, the disagreements, and the suffering as a natural part of life. Anger and frustration only make things feel worse! Tolerance and acceptance in good times and bad is a quality that everyone is drawn to and admires.

Generosity

Earlier we talked about the importance of maintaining an attitude of service. Nothing sets you apart like being generous, kind, and compassionate to others. In the arena of brand building, being willing to help people with no expectations of a payback will make you utterly irresistible.

Of course, just because you share your advice or help your prospective customer at no charge doesn’t mean they are definitely going to buy from you. We help our prospects and customers because it’s the right thing to do. Buyers today naturally gravitate to people who are happy to share what they know.

Kindness is a tremendous differentiator. So, my philosophy is . . .

Lead with generosity and let the law of reciprocity take it from there.

One way to keep your heart right is to remember the times when somebody helped you. Think back to the time somebody took a chance on you and the time when someone went out of their way to help you solve a problem. Never lose sight of the situations where someone else’s generosity blessed you. Then, go out and pay it forward! Become the kind of person that people would describe as generous. Some will reciprocate. Some won’t. It’s all good!

Integrity

The word integrity has been so overused! What does it even mean, anyway? Integrity, or what some might simply call goodness, is the quality of being honorable, moral, ethical, and respectable. It is a commitment to what is honest and truthful regardless of the personal consequences of either loss or gain. It denotes a strong moral compass that governs everything you say and do. I also like to interpret it using the word integrated. To me, integrity indicates wholeness or a state of being balanced and complete.

How does this apply to selling? One person who truly exemplifies integrity in the business world is Larry Levine, author of Selling from the Heart: How Your Authentic Self Sells You. The cornerstone of Larry’s approach is interacting with and serving your customers in the same natural, empathetic way you would treat a friend or a family member.

Integrity appears in your dealings with everyone around you: coworkers, employees, customers, etc. It is revealed in how you honor the commitments that you make.

For this reason, I like to stress this point . . .

You can never meet expectations if they are not properly set to begin with.

Part of developing your integrity is carefully making promises that you know you can keep and then keeping them. Integrity is displayed when you consistently do what you say you are going to do.

Dependability

Much like integrity, dependability is being predictable in the way you respond to circumstances and the people around you. Your customers need to know that they can count on you when things don’t go according to plan.

Unfortunately, this is not always evident until the customer has some sort of crisis situation, but you can demonstrate responsiveness and faithfulness even in the everyday give-and-take of commitments. Even small things like showing up right on time and getting back to people in a timely manner speaks volumes about your dependability and how much your customer can rely on you.

One of the best ways to let your customers know what they can expect from you if things go off the rails is to capture references and testimonials from the customers for whom you have gone the extra mile. One of my clients did a great job documenting this with case studies of how they came to the rescue when their customers encountered major problems. They created a series of outstanding short videos showing a dozen different examples of how their support teams went above and beyond the call of duty to keep their clients up and running and then posted them both on their website and on social media. Brilliant!

Humanity

The word humanity has become very popular in recent years to describe what it means to treat people with genuine caring, gentleness, and respect. Where is there room for gentleness in business, you ask? Wherever there are human beings! People want to be treated as human first. This applies to customers, employees, and coworkers. Companies are discovering that a profit-first mentality, instead of putting people first, is a recipe for losing their most talented employees, who have a multitude of choices about where and how they work.

One good example of this humanity-first mindset has been championed by Dale Dupree, a popular figure on LinkedIn and leader of The Sales Rebellion movement. His philosophy is that we need to stop thinking of people as “accounts” and start seeing them as human beings.

Dale contends that business is not all about profit at the expense of the very people we are supposed to be serving. We need to think about treating our customers and our employees the way they deserve to be treated. Then, profit naturally takes care of itself.

That’s hardly an unheard-of idea. It’s actually been around for a couple thousand years. But it certainly has been forgotten in many corporate sales environments where quotas and profitability seem to trump everything else, including relationships and even our mental and physical health. Society is beginning to realize it’s time to bring more humanity into the business world.

Self-Mastery

One of the most appealing characteristics of magnetic people is their ability to maintain self-mastery. Great leaders and people that others want to follow exhibit self-control and temperance. The ability to apply self-discipline and restraint is incredibly appealing. When people see it or read about it online, they can’t help but want to hear more.

I’m not talking about the guy who is hyper-disciplined to work out three hours a day, seven days a week or brags about putting in 14 hours on the phones day after day. That’s not self-control and self-mastery. That’s extremism! What we all want and are attracted to is a well-balanced life that blends work with family, serving others, and having a bit of fun along the way. Now that’s magnetic!

Let’s not forget: your brand should be a representation of who you really are. Don’t try to come off as a superhuman overachiever that no one can relate to. You want to be yourself. But a life of moderation and balance tends to bring out your best self. Live this way and you’ll inspire a lot of other people, too!

As you can see, building a magnetic personal brand is not a quick and easy two-hour project that you can complete by writing some catchy one-liners, upgrading your logo, and adding a bit of flashy graphic design to your website. Your brand is you! It is expressed by a lifetime commitment to bettering yourself every single day.

I think it’s vital to remember that you’re not competing with anybody else. You can never be someone else, but it’s also true that no one else can ever be you. If you want to build a personal brand, put yourself out there for the world to see. I’m confident the payback will be far more rewarding than you can possibly ask or imagine.

Putting These Ideas into Practice