Brand You – 12 Steps to a Powerful Personal Brand

http://www.asktheexperts.org.uk/brand-you-12-steps-to-a-powerful-personal-brand.html

I’d like you to remember the last time that someone tried to sell you something? Maybe it was a car salesman, estate agent, insurance salesman or simply someone who cold called you or knocked on your door.

When they gave you the sales spiel and the hard sell, how did it make you feel? I suspect that your defences went up and any trace of a smile instantly left your face.

Traditional approaches to selling like direct mail, cold calling and aggressive closing techniques have had their day. Whilst you might get a few sales here and there, these tactics won’t build your brand or grow your business half as well as using a trust based sales approach.

If you focus on doing the right thing for your customer and value the relationship above the sale, you’ll increase both your sales and customer retention rates.

I don’t want to go all woolly and New Age on you, but the “You get what you give mantra” is at the foundation of successful business relationships.

The best way to sell it transpires is to not to sell.

The best way to influence people is to not try and influence them at all.

The best way to be credible is to be who you are, tell the truth and admit what you don’t know.

Whether you switch on the television, read a newspaper or are surfing the net there’s a good chance that you’ll come across some sort of “crisis” sooner rather than later. It might be a financial crisis, or the crisis of global warming or maybe the energy crisis.
Now I don’t wish to diminish any of these crises but the real crisis in our society today is the one of a lack of trust. There exists a trust deficit.

In the 21st Century, the world’s most precious resource is trust.

In an age of excess supply we’re all competing for heart and mind share. But people’s attention is scarce because we’re being bombarded with information and data like never before.

A week’s worth of The Times contains more information than a person was likely to come across in a lifetime in the 18th Century. The result of this information overload is that everyone is competing for eyeballs. People have less time to engage with you and even if they do engage with you, they have less time to buy into you and what you’re selling.

But the good news is that the ability to earn trust is a skill which can be learned.

Trust isn’t an intangible soft skill. It’s a measurable competency which can produce quite dramatic results.

When a brand is trusted, people pay more, come back and tell others. That’s the case with Apple.

When a salesperson is trusted, people will buy. As is the case with Sir Richard Branson at Virgin.

When a leader is trusted, people follow: Nelson Mandela

The irony is that the buyer has a lust for trust.

If the buyer has a trusted business partner it means that the buyer doesn’t have to waste time and energy choosing between lots of suppliers and then managing the supplier to make sure that they’re delivering what’s been agreed.

Conversely, when there’s a lack of trust everything costs more, takes more time and is more stressful.

This holds true whether there’s a lack of trust with your partner, a friend or a client.

Professional athletes and celebrities who have breached the public’s trust in them, lose millions of pounds in endorsements.

Your credit rating is really a measure of how much a financial institution trusts you to pay back a debt.

Research by the management consultancy Watson Wyatt shows that companies where there is high trust tend to outperform companies where there is low trust by almost 3 to 1.

Anything of any value, whether it’s a personal relationship, or a billion pound business, is based on trust.

The price of doing business is trust.

When people believe in you and trust you, they will buy from you.

The currency of business and life isn’t money, it’s trust.

Over the course of this programme, I’ll show you to make an impact, build trust and increase your sales.

In Step 2 I’ll be focussing on the power of authenticity and the more you do who you are, the more successful you’ll be.

As well as being a recognised authority on personal branding and peak performance, Sunil is a critically acclaimed author and blogger.

His corporate experience includes roles as Head of Talent on behalf of Vodafone Group, Santander (UK) and Cable & Wireless Europe. Sunil has also run a multi-million pound recruitment business, and is a Non Executive Director.

Sunil’s first degree in Sports Science and Psychology fuelled his passion for the psychology of human achievement and well-being. As well as possessing an MBA, he is a qualified Psychotherapist and Executive Coach.

www.sunilbali.com