Every sales professional and entrepreneur needs a profitable brand, and the key is to build a brand online and leverage it for rapid sales growth.

Corey Blake is the CEO at MWI, an international digital marketing agency. His background is in sales and business development and he has managed great sales teams over the years.

Validate your brand

When it comes to building a brand and then leveraging it for growth, you must begin by validating your brand. You basically want to turn off any sirens that the potential customer has about you as a seller.

We all know that a stigma exists around sellers, and you likely even experience it when someone gets on the phone with you to sell you something, despite the fact that you're in sales yourself.

The biggest challenge often originates from the fact that we build great brands and we know we have value to offer, but we don't know how to convince people to pay for it. How you validate your brand is critical in that process.

It's simply legitimizing your brand, service, or product. You must find a third party or another way to validate it. You could share that your brand has been featured on certain sites or that you've been invited to certain events.

When you're starting out, go to your customer. Offer to give a customer your product or service in exchange for their use of it. Explain that you think it will make his life better and that you'd like to ask for his testimonial.

Now you've got validation and social proof to use in your next sales conversation.

Personal confidence

Seeing someone use your product provides you, as the seller, a certain amount of confidence as well.

If you prefer, you can create great case studies or build a social media presence that includes amazing content. For MWI, for example, they can validate themselves as great content creators by creating great content.

As a bonus, TSE has used those product giveaways as an opportunity to gain feedback during our initial launches so we can figure out where we need to tweak our training or our products. It also helps us build a case study.

Through all of this, you'll build your own excitement and you'll develop even more confidence, which is the key to success. Begin your entrepreneur journey by selling yourself on the value you're providing to the world.

[Tweet "If you can't sell yourself, you'll never sell to anyone else. Become the greatest ambassador for the value you're going to provide. #ValueAmbassador"]

Linking value

Once you've established confidence in your value, use your marketing to communicate it to your potential customers. It's not enough to be sold on your own value, but you must find someone else who is sold on your value as well.

Find a publication that will tell its audience how legit you are.

Once you've built this validation, you'll have an amazing ability to sell your product or service with exclusivity. You'll find yourself in the driver's seat and gives you leverage in your communication and makes your sale more exclusive.

If you establish exclusivity, you almost won't have to sell your customers as much. You'll simply have to educate them and move them along the sales process. Exclusivity is priceless.

Finding balance

No one wants to be perceived as the typical used car salesman. Don't come across as gimmicky, selfish, or ignorant. Instead, strive for confident, competent, professional, and controlled. There's a balance to it.

Assume your customer has never heard of your validation and mention it to him. Within the first 20 seconds, provide that validation to establish confidence and control. Find a way to organically share it without being perceived as cocky.

The alarms about whether you're legit will shut down. Then you can offer the idea that you only work with a certain kind of brand, and that allows you to operate with a lot more control.

Close early, close often

Make sure you're asking for the business. Develop specific strategies to close deals. Beautiful branding and validation won't matter if you can't close. Consistently think strategically about how you'll move this sale to the place you want it.

Provide the customer with the right information and the right details so that she'll be ready to close.

Closing amounts to more than the way you speak, the speed of your speech, and the tone of your voice. These things do constantly lead to close, but you have to figure out how to move to the specific points along the process.

Many sellers are fearful of the conversion side so they hold off too long. Or they get anxious and they ask for the sale way too soon. If you follow the process, that's where you'll see the difference.

Sales process

You can have all the right components in place, but without a repeatable sales process, you'll struggle to support your sales. If your process isn't organized in a way that leads to close at all times, you won't succeed.

Determine how to leverage all the components you've gathered to move your customers toward a deal. Leverage your value, your validation, your exclusivity, and your communication to ask for the business.

Corey's goal at the end of the sales process is to structure the process so that the _customer_ asks for the next steps without him having to sell it. That's when you know you've hit the nail on the head.

Organizing your tools

Corey worked with James Carberry at Sweetfish Media to help him set up a process of validation. James already had significant validation because he had a large number of podcasts with great guests and he writes for large publications. They simply had to find a way to organize the validation.

In their case, all the tools were sitting there waiting to be used.

Focus on providing real value. Sell yourself on the value you're providing to individuals and industry. When you love what you're doing and you aren't simply trying to make a buck, people will want to be part of that.

Good businesses are built on products that will make a difference. It doesn't have to be an altruistic notion like ending world hunger. We would all benefit if we could go to work every day and provide value that you believe in to everyone else.

"Build a Brand Online and Leverage It for Rapid Sales Growth" episode resources

You can connect with Corey at Corey@mwi.com. Mention that you heard me on this podcast. You can also find him on LinkedIn @Corey Blake.

Connect with me at donald@thesalesevangelist.com.

Try the first module of the TSE Certified Sales Training Program for free.

This episode is brought to you by the TSE Certified Sales Training Program. I developed this training course because I struggled early on as a seller. Once I had the chance to go through my own training, I noticed a hockey-stick improvement in my performance.

TSE Certified Sales Training Program can help you out of your slump. If you gave a lot of great presentations and did a lot of hard work, only to watch your prospects choose to work with your competitors, we can help you fix that. The new semester of TSE Certified Sales Training Program begins in April and it would be an absolute honor to have you join us.

Tools for sellers

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Mailtag.io allows you to see around the corners. You can see when people open your email, or when they click on the link you sent. Mailtag.io will give you half-off your subscription for life when you use the Promo Code: Donald at check out.

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Your brand tells your story when you're not in the room, and today Lindsay Pedersen shares tips for forging an ironclad brand with sales reps, entrepreneurs, and other business professionals. 
Lindsay is a brand strategist who helps professionals identify the single idea that their business stands for. She's passionate about working with leaders to harness the power of brand every day. 
Branding
Brand is what you stand for in the mind of your audience. If your audience is a group of customers, it's the thing you mean to your customers. If it's future employers, it's what you mean to them. It's a crystallized meaning of what you uniquely bring to your audience. 
[Tweet "When you stand for one idea, it's easier for your audience to grasp it than if you stand for multiple ideas. It's easier for a person to let one idea in. #branding"]
When you spray a bunch of ideas out, it's harder for your audience to understand. It's in our interest for our audience to be able to understand because they'll be more like to remember us, like us, and talk about us. 
It's up to us to make it easy by distilling it for them.
Empathy
We want to empathize and understand what it's like to be our customer. You and your company are not the center of the universe for that customer. They have many other things going on besides your value proposition. 
When you crystallize it into something specific, it uses their worldview rather than their worldview. It makes it easier for them to buy what you're selling.
Sometimes as businesses, we forget that we're not selling to a machine or an inanimate object. We're selling to humans with joys, sorrows, scarcities, worries, and pride. When they feel seen they are more likely to bond with you and want to do business with you. 
Deconstructing brand
One of Lindsay's motives for writing her book was people's widely varying definitions of brand. For some people, it's the name of the business. For others, it's the logo. Others assume it's related to marketing budget or television advertising.
 She concluded that the concept was becoming problematic, and she wanted to demystify it. 
There's some merit to all of those ideas, but she needed to bust the myths about what brand isn't. Otherwise, we'll keep having puzzling conversations where people aren't speaking the same language. 
9 Criteria of ironclad brand
Not all brand is created equally. You have a brand whether you deliberately created it or allowed it to be passively created. 
If you aren't actively choosing the meaning, you won't have the brand position you want to have.

1. A brand needs to be big enough to matter to your customer.
2. A brand must be narrow enough that you own it. 
3. Your brand must be asymmetrical so it uses your lopsided advantage to position you with your customer. 
4.  Your brand must be empathetic enough to address a deeply relevant human need. 
5. It must be optimally distinct so it strikes a balance between being a familiar promise while also being novel. 
6. It's a balance between functional and emotional so that it's rationally meaningful to your customer but also emotionally resonant. 
7. Your brand must be a sharp-edged promise that is simple and singular. 
8. It must have teeth and be demonstrably true. 
9. Your brand must deliver on time, consistently, every time. 

Vision
When you think of sharp objects as they relate to your vision, those things are easier to see. Your eyes have to do less work. 
Ease is good because when you ask less of your audience they are more likely to learn and remember. An example of this is the fact that people around the world associate the Volvo brand with safety. Same thing with Prius, because people think of fuel-efficient cars. 
Buick doesn't have this sharp edge in its branding. If you're the CEO of Buick, how do you feel when your audience doesn't know what your brand means? Who even is the audience?
The Buick salespeople have to do much more work than the Volvo or Prius salespeople. 
Wide net
We assume that if we can keep the door open without narrowing our message to a target customer that we'll appeal to everyone. The reality is that it's an illusion of an opportunity. 
The more an entity puts a stake in the ground, the more authentic they are perceived to be. Customers won't trust companies who won't take a stand on anything. 
People respect you more when you demonstrate what you're optimizing for. 
The other thing is that developing a specific message might turn away the people you shouldn't be serving anyway, but that's ok because it's time and money you could devote to the people who are your target customers. 
Mystique
Remove the mystique of branding. You don't have to have a good handle on branding in order to intentionally craft your own brand. 
Choose with crystal clarity who your target customer is, but don't just rely on demographic observations. What are they like? What keeps them up at night? What do they value in life? 
This doesn't mean you don't sell to other people. It just means that you optimize with humility on your way to forging an ironclad brand. 
"Forging An Ironclad Brand" episode resources
Grab a copy of Lindsay's book Forging An Ironclad Brand. She also has a free giveaway on www.ironcladbrandstrategy.com. You can grab the workbook that Lindsay adapted from her book. It's a supplement that provides a step-by-step workbook-style guide to building your own brand strategy. 
If you haven't connected with me on LinkedIn already, do that at Donald C. Kelly and watch the things I'm sharing there.
You've heard us talk about the TSE Certified Sales Training Program, and we're offering the first module free as a gift to you. Preview it. Check it out. If it makes sense for you to join, you can be part of our upcoming semester.
You can take it on your own or as part of the semester group. The program includes 65 videos altogether, and we just completed a beta group that helped us improve the program and maximize the information in it.
If you and your team are interested in learning more, we'd love to have you join us. Call (561)578-1729 to speak directly to me or one of our team members about the program.
This episode is also brought to you in part by mailtag.io, a Chrome browser extension for Gmail that allows you to track and schedule your emails. You'll receive real-time alerts anyone opens an email or clicks a link.
I hope you enjoyed the show today as much as I did. If so, please consider leaving us a rating on Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Stitcher, or wherever you consume this content and share it with someone else who might benefit from our message. It helps others find our message and improves our visibility.
Audio provided by Free SFX and Bensound.

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