So I have to ask, what is the difference then between — and I’m going to offend you here — what you do and personal branding?
Not to say there is no difference, but I’m deliberately asking you so you can clarify for everyone else.
I’m glad you’re being clear. Otherwise, you’d be like, “How dare you?”
Because I feel like everyone out there now — there’s suddenly a new LinkedIn trainer every week on LinkedIn, and it’s just nuts.
I just don’t really understand why.
People, we’ve hit peak LinkedIn trainer for sure this year.
Honestly, it’s a joke.
And so personal branding is all the rage, and everyone seems to be a personal branding expert.
I don’t quite know how.
But you are an expert in LinkedIn, and you don’t call yourself a personal branding expert.
This is not what you do.
And like you said, conversion is your priority.
Can you please walk through what you do and how it’s very different to personal branding?
Yeah.
And I want to put a big disclaimer in at the start.
I like personal branding.
Done right, it is utterly critical to your next level of success. It’s absolutely crucial.
The two major rockets behind my business were shifting from Facebook to LinkedIn and starting to put money behind people who know what they’re doing to help me build my brand properly, rather than, “Maybe I’ll quote Henry Ford today.”
So, personal branding, in my understanding, has a number of definitions, as we know.
But personal branding is not being popular on social media.
A personal brand is when people have an aligned sense of what you’re about and what you’re there for, and they feel a certain way about you.
Everywhere they see you and everywhere they go, it feels aligned and consistent.
And the people who get that right, who know what they’re doing — the proper personal brand specialists, who I know plenty of and am very fortunate to know — they’re the ones who really go deep on the science and the theory behind it.
Rather than, “I can 10x your profile and I can make you popular.”
And that is smoke and mirrors to cover up the fact that very little else might happen.
And of course, when someone then does get a customer, it’s confirmation bias that it all works.
Yes, exactly.
So there’s a crucial definition there.
I happen to have some measure of a personal brand behind what I do because I am disciplined enough to stay in my lane and every day talk about the thing I do.
And if I talk about adjacent topics, I map them to what I do.
So everyone knows.
Whenever they’ve seen my content enough, everyone has a sense of what I’m there for and what I want to talk about.
And my flavor is always related to conversion.
It’s not always, “That’s rubbish” or “That’s no good,” but I will call out any suggestion that you just need more followers, or you just need more audience, or more engagement.
So specifically, what I do is help people understand that deals — real conversion, proper deals, and acquisition of a customer — ultimately come down to one person and you.
An interaction between two people.
It might be online, it might be on a call, it might be in person.
Ultimately, money has to come down to that one person.
Even if you’re speaking to a customer with multiple stakeholders, one person ultimately is going to sign off.
And that interaction between you and them is multifaceted and needs to be understood.
What’s interesting, going back to the top of this session, is that there’s a view from those who maybe aren’t as versed in the details and nuance in business that it’s either value for the masses or being salesy.
But there’s a spectrum.
And what you’ve got there are two far extremes of a spectrum.
I’m trying to articulate this right.
At one end, it’s:
“If I become super popular and influential and have a big personal brand, then I don’t have to do anything. People just buy stuff.”
Which is a thing. It can work.
But you have to hold your breath for years while you grind to get everyone to love you.
The other end is no personal brand.
This is what I used to do when I was in my early twenties in the city.
You just dial and call and impose and sell at people.
My job was to do 100 dials a day.
Yeah.
I wasn’t doing literally anything else.
Not account management of the companies I’d sold to.
One hundred dials a day.
If I did all right, I would pop out the end of the week with one deal.
One percent.
No, less than one.
Maybe one every week.
Because I was doing 500 a week, and I would probably get 10 to 15 actual demos of our product.
I was selling internet marketing in 2003.
And I would get a deal.
We’re talking two grand.
My first deal was $1,700 for a year of internet marketing.
Because back then people were like, “Oh, come on, the internet? Are you kidding?”
We’d just had the dot-com bubble burst.
“We’ll stick with paid advertising in newspapers and things like that.”
So, a long time ago.
But what’s interesting is that that is a far extreme.
People don’t want that.
Cold outreach does not work.
Let me be clear on it.
It does not work as a way to make sure you can get deals every single day.
You can grind, and you might win some people who happen to be in the market for it.
But it’s not a strategy that is fulfilling for either party.
They didn’t want you.
You didn’t want to do it.
You happened to overturn something that ended up as a purchase.
But it’s a bit like buying lottery tickets and happening to win every so often.
Now, in the middle is something of the two.
And for the last ten years running my own business, I’ve really enjoyed the attraction gained through content.
But I’m never focused on virality or follower count.
I’m always focused on one crucial thing:
Am I saying the right thing to the right people?
Now, if I was selling how to be popular and how to be a LinkedIn guru, then I would be going for leverage in the form of loads of followers and loads of engagement.
But I need one person, ultimately, to be like, “Hey, that could be useful,” or, “Hey, I like the opinion you wrote today.”
And then that’s my starting point.
So I’m really helping people to understand that, sure, volume can help.
But there comes a time — and daily it should be — where you choose to interact with individuals.
Because when you interact with individuals — I hate the term “picking them from the herd” because it’s like a lion taking a wildebeest — but it really is like that.
They’re all listening, but ultimately you have to speak to individuals.
And when you have deep conversations with a very low volume of people each day — this is high-ticket selling — rather than trying to speak to millions, what happens is you get depth.
And when you get depth, you get trust.
And when you get trust, you get a propensity toward possibly hearing you out and maybe wanting to buy from you.
And sales…
No one likes to sell.
No.
But they bloody love it when someone wants to buy.
Yeah.
Suddenly sales is the best thing ever.
And I find it laughable when people say, “Oh, I don’t sell, Richard, because people just come to me.”
It’s like, well, you do sell because there’s a point when you have to take the order.
Ideally, this is the fusion of marketing and sales, isn’t it?
Brand and marketing and all that kind of world.
Because if you get it right, all that heavy lifting of positioning and the optics around seeing you in the right way, and essentially this internal emotional belief that you’re their hero who can fix the problem, gets done before the point when you’re interacting.
In short, when they’re kind of in love with you a bit.
That’s the point where you’re like, “So, how do I not mess that bit up?”
And that is critical, that moment.
I’m so fortunate that in my past I learned how to do bread-and-butter sales.
You know, $1,700 deals all the way up to six-figure deals.
And what that feels like.
In person.
That kind of thing.
I really cut my teeth in just volume selling over a decade.
It’s wonderful to do that.
All of those experiences have really helped me understand what it feels like to be in the buyer’s chair.
And I think what matters is that if we’re trying to transact, we need to understand that how we want to sell — which is, “Hey, could you buy my thing please?” — everyone is like, “Oh my God.”
Of course that isn’t going to happen.
What we need to do instead is meet them where they are.
And the state of a buyer, potentially a buyer, when they look at your content is typically:
“Huh, that’s kind of cool.”
“Okay, who is that person?”
And then they’re gone.
So how do we nurture that cool, passive audience member?
People really like this because I think they like the fact that obviously the outcome is deals, and people like money — don’t know why, it’s weird.
But prior to that, they really like the depth and nuance around how people interact.
And what I love the most, aside from people making money — because they love that a lot — is when people say things like:
“I didn’t realize that about how I was interacting.”
“I didn’t realize if I said it in that way that it would have that effect.”
Those minor blind spots can make massive changes.
One of my favorite moments a few years ago was a chap I worked with who said:
“I just love that now I don’t scare people off when someone looks at my profile.”
Because most people genuinely — and I mean it — most people I speak to are paralyzed to the point that they don’t bother to interact because there’s this fear of:
“Well, I’m going to piss them off.”
Or:
“I’m going to say something wrong.”
So they don’t even try.
Meanwhile, their business is tanking completely.
We have to try.
But if you can bring a bit of elegance, you tend to find that people are quite happy to speak to you.
The key — and this is ultimately the point I’m trying to make — is not to be salesy.
The key is to run everything through a filter first of:
“If someone said it to me…”
Or an even better one:
“If I said it to someone literally face to face, would I cringe or feel the ick?”
Yeah.
If so, don’t.
Yeah, I think that’s everyone’s fear, isn’t it? To feel cringe.
What I’ve noticed, though, is that there’s obviously different things people are selling.
And I think the popularity thing, and posting the Henry Ford quote, and posting all the generic niceties that look really popular, only work if you’re then selling a course or something.
Because those people are selling the course, and they still don’t need to interact with anyone.
Essentially, you don’t actually have any face-to-face contact there.
There are people out there setting up a business like that because essentially they don’t have anything real to give.
So they have AI churning out their content.
Then they have AI creating their videos for them.
They’ve got a video avatar of themselves, which is wild.
They’ve just got AI doing that for them.
And then they’re all directed into a course that’s pre-recorded from a script written by AI or someone else.
To perpetuate and sell how to do exactly what they’ve done.
Exactly.
So actually there’s not really any value given because they’re not actually doing anything.
They’re just taking AI and putting it into the form of themselves.
So they don’t need to sell anything.
Because I’ve actually got something to give.
The problem is, I think there’s so much content geared around that kind of selling, and it just doesn’t work if you’re in the process of selling a real service.
Real consulting.
An agency.
That kind of thing.
I just don’t think the same method works.
