222: Selling Before Meeting The Buyer

<p>We all understand the importance of a brand.  Brands are a short form description of long term reliability and perceived trust, both based on solid evidence.  Every business has a brand. You might be thinking that your company is too small and insignificant to have a brand.  Yet you deal with your own staff and for them, the business is a brand because of their experience with you as their employer.  Suppliers serve you and for them you are a brand, based on how you treat them.  There will be buyers and they have already positioned your brand, based on the way you partner with them to serve their interests.</p> <p> </p> <p>Our company brand does the selling for us, up to a certain point.  As salespeople though we have our own brands.  Clients buy us first, then they buy our widget.  They are putting their trust in our reliability to provide them with the right solutions to help their business.  Salespeople from our firms, past and present, collectively establish the brand in the market, based on their individual service capabilities for buyers.</p> <p> </p> <p>Today, social media has given every salesperson an amplification opportunity never before available in commercial history.  This is a double edged sword.  If the service is poor or problematic, then bad news travels far and fast.  Once upon a time, if you didn’t do a good job for the client, maybe 10 people might know about it.  Today, thousands can know about it instantly.</p> <p> </p> <p>Let me illustrate. A businessman in Tokyo, whom I had known for many years and would occasionally meet at networking events, had his personal brand trashed.  There was some dispute with the President of another company, who said they were not paid for a service they had provided to his company.  This information appeared on LinkedIn and was in my newsfeed.  At that moment, I realised how powerful social media was. I did a search on this guy and what a Pandora’s Box of woe and trouble that released.  Based on what I read, I would never do business with him. If anyone ch