Personal branding: blow your own trumpet hard!
These are some key tips from my book “The Corporate Sales Winners Guide”, how to make a lot more money and become more successful at work. Thanks to a stronger personal brand at work. Whether you like it or not, everyone has a “personal brand”: their own unique personal brand. Everything you do and how you present yourself to the outside world contributes to or actually damages your personal brand.
Especially when sharing information on social media, you have to be very careful. You have to be constantly working on optimizing your own personal brand, because biases are created in no time. This applies both online on social media and professional sites like LinkedIn, but also offline. For example, through your behavior at the office and your presentation at trade shows, seminars and networking get-togethers.
Are you neglecting your own personal brand? Well, then you are missing out on an awful lot of opportunities! It can take a lot of effort to repair damage. Therefore, always invest enough time and attention in optimizing your personal brand. You will see, that you will then be approached faster for new opportunities. With a strong personal brand, you will make a lot more money than the rest and people will trust and respect you.
Why a personal brand is so important when competing among colleagues for promotions, permanent contracts and higher pay
Your “personal brand” is a reflection of your own personality, behavior, achievements, standards and values. Especially in larger companies, or companies with a lot of internal competition, owning a strong personal brand is very important. Especially there, because there is so much competition and everyone is busy with their own targets. In these types of companies, it becomes increasingly difficult to stand out and to distinguish yourself from the rest.
If you work well and hard, this is not an automatic guarantee that you will also get noticed! It does not guarantee that you are then going to get the maximum reward and recognition from your colleagues and managers. On the contrary…
If no one knows who you are, what you do and what great accomplishments you have, how can those people make positive judgments about you when it really matters? If you don’t inform anyone about your fantastic new projects, accomplishments, new deals and new clients, you create a bland, worthless personal brand. A meaningless, empty and boring image.
You think you are working hard and scoring well and that may be true in your own world, but no one else knows about it! It is only reality that is visible only to you!
Why your incompetent colleague keeps running off with your promotion at work
Then again and again, it’s those shrewd colleagues with the biggest mouths. Those colleagues who utter the most “bullshit” and know all about smart internal networking. It is those colleagues who always run off with all the credits and rewards. Including the credits that should have gone to your personal brand!
Everyone talks about those hawkish colleagues and how great they are for the company, when in fact they are not performing very well, if at all. They just play the internal networking and sleazy game super well and you get annoyed to no end … day in and day out! You don’t understand how it is possible, that your colleague who does almost nothing memorable, can be so popular with management and that he is the darling of your boss.
Sound familiar? I have had to experience it myself many times in the past unfortunately! It is really incredibly frustrating and so unfair! I therefore started to delve into this topic. In fact, I now dare say that within companies it’s all about 30% performance and 70% personal brand. Sometimes the ratio may be even more skewed!
Among those 70% include the following skills:
- Smart internal networking.
- Huge boast.
- Getting away with other people’s results.
- Cunningly appropriating the good creative ideas of another person.
- Sucking up to the boss.
A complicated and morally reprehensible game and incredibly unfair to the genuinely hard, passionate workers among us.
The answer to dealing with these types of losers at your office is as follows:
- Invest in a great personal brand.
- Boldly blow your own image trumpet if you have accomplished or conceived anything good at all.
Create a super strong personal brand and attract money and success like a magnet at work
From today on, do this often and frequently! Then no one can ignore you anymore! Eventually your personal brand will become stronger and stronger and you will attract money and success like a magnet. There will be no one to stop you.
You know what the great thing is? When managers want to check what you’ve really accomplished then? Then they will really see, that you have only taken good initiatives and achieved good results! The colleagues who only talk the talk will sooner or later be exposed. Then, when a nasty reorganization comes along, everyone will know how valuable you are. You then have a much better chance of surviving that difficult period, while all the doubters and unremarkable colleagues are fired.
By personal branding and giving your manager proactive insight into your work, you can also give him the impression that you are very busy and that is excellent! Do you know why? You will then succeed in convincing your manager to take over work from you!
Yes!!! You heard right…. YOU are delegating work to your manager instead of the other way around!
With increasing workloads, you can hardwire that things are getting more and more challenging for you. It becomes increasingly difficult to be able to focus primarily on generating additional deals. Additional revenue-enhancing activities, such as acquisition of new customers, visiting customers, making quotations and negotiating.
Many managers are sensitive to this because, after all, they want nothing more than for you to meet your sales targets! They want to keep their ideal, most successful employee happy! They don’t want their top salesperson to burn out from too much administration and non-sales-related activities. You can only win this game, however, if you have first created a strong personal brand and then gradually, subtly revealed your busy daily life.
A strong personal brand and blowing your personal trumpet loudly command respect and admiration. Those are going to help you work more efficiently, successfully and relaxed in the office. It’s going to help you stand out more quickly from your main internal competitors: Colleagues!
14 Tips for strengthening your own personal brand at work
The tips below are going to help you get started building your own personal brand. If you apply them you’re going to see the first results within just a few weeks. Because you can benefit from them immediately, you’re going to enjoy further and further optimizing your personal brand!
- During informal conversations at the coffee machine, subtly share your personal success stories. For example, include how you resolved a conflict with a customer. Tell what steps you took to increase customer satisfaction. Always make sure you can easily list a few examples.
- Talk enthusiastically and passionately about your amazing activities! Use emotion and nonverbal communication! Make sure others can feel your energy and passion, which can also make them enthusiastic. It should be contagious and motivate them too!
- Talk to important people within your company about your activities. Get out of your comfort zone and sit at a new table every lunch. Do this so you can talk to different colleagues who really matter in the organization. The most important thing is that all important colleagues know who you are and all that you do for the company. In turn, you want them to talk positively about you and ideally … to your immediate manager!
- Ask open-ended questions and introduce new ideas, about how you could further increase customer satisfaction. How you could help the company cut costs.
- Talk to the managers of the various departments (e.g., operations, finance). Ask them, how they think the mutual cooperation between sales and that department can be improved. Discuss your ideas with them.
- If you have helped a colleague with something, always make sure that at least your manager knows about it! Make sure he knows, that you are helping other colleagues to be successful as well. It is really incredibly important, because this shows that you are very involved in the well-being of the team and the company. That you are apparently not just focused on your bonus and individual targets.
- If you have served a client well and the client suggests if he can do something for you, suggest the following: Ask the customer, if he would like to put in a good word for you with someone on the management team, or else directly with your manager. This will give managers from outside sources confirmation that the customer is very satisfied with you. That’s golden for your personal brand! Especially if it goes first to the management team and then is passed on to your manager You’ll be amazed, how many customers are willing to do this for you. All you have to do is ask them!
- The same thing also works internally, because you can ask a colleague to do the same thing for you. You then have to package it differently so that it doesn’t look strange. You also don’t want to do this too often or it will really stand out. After all, you don’t want to give your colleagues creative thoughts about doing the same thing.
- Ask the colleague you just helped to put in a good word for you and he can thank you to your manager. With the reason packaged, “That you have been very busy and because you helped, you had a little less time for those other sales activities.” The colleague will understand this immediately and have no problem with this, but you know better! This in turn creates more flexibility for yourself because your manager sees that you are busy.
- Try providing content for the internal newsletter. Make sure you are mentioned more often in the internal newsletter. For example, with one of your successes or important major projects you are working on. Then everyone will know what you are working on and you will continue to stand out in a positive way.
- During sales meetings and forecasting, always be prepared and share important successes.
- Remember that everything you say and share should always be told with extra enthusiasm. Even if something is really not that special! Make sure it sounds great and is presented great! Everything you do is great! Everything you have done will lead to fantastic results! Stay positive and avoid negative thoughts.
- Always present everything you do as something great, but make sure that if you do something wrong, don’t be afraid to acknowledge it either. Instead, share what you learned and tell what steps you have taken to prevent it from happening again. Share the steps you took during the sales meeting and at the lunch table. That way others can learn from your mistakes, too.
- Create a strong ego and become a bit of a narcissist. Why? It’s just great to be a little narcissist and have a nice strong ego at work! Don’t be tempted by critics who tell you to stay far away from that! The more you believe in yourself and are convinced that everything you do is great, the more successful you will be. Thus, this becomes the new reality for you! Your self-confidence will go through the roof like a rocket. You will attract money, success and recognition like a magnet!
If we all have to work to make money anyway, we better make it as fantastic and interesting as possible right? Exactly! Therefore: Create an ego and strong personality to color your own brand with.
I hope these tips are going to help you and that you are going to get results quickly in building your own amazing personal brand! I hope you will blow your own trumpet with great joy and success, often and loudly!
Book Source
The corporate sales winners guide: Transform your life and become a top sales performer – by Gerrit Jan de Vries. Available on Amazon, Google Play Books and Bol.com.