In today’s episode of the ‘Sales Samurai’ podcast, host Sam Capra, who helps marketing leaders in the retail space go beyond the sale/transaction, talks with guest Mary Henderson, Founder of Mary Henderson Coaching which specializes in personal branding, and several other things. She discusses why personal brand matters in sales, specifically. She also shares some great tips for defining a personal brand.

Episode Highlights

• 02:08 – Mary wants to share why personal branding and sales go hand-in-hand.
• 04:36 – Mary shares that back in the year 2000, she realized that she can build a brand around this, she is going to be known in the tech industry for the person that can fix these types of problems.
• 05:19 – Mary turned around the business from a declining 8 million to a $22 million business in eighteen-month period.
• 06:08 – The host explains how she became a specialist in personal branding, and also in commercializing personal brains.
• 08:08 – A salesperson is not a linear person, a salesperson can't cope being stuck in a structured environment, brilliant salespeople are unstructured people, says Mary.
• 09:44 – Mary says, her passion is bringing the best out of a human being.
• 10:04 – Sam enquires, how do you define personal branding?
• 12:15 – One should not be talking about his personal brand from a vanity metric standpoint; he should be talking about his brand from the fact.
• 14:38 – We are in a fully digitized economy and every salesperson is judged by their brand currencies or their social currency, Mary explains.
• 17:34 – We need to be proactive, not reactive, and we also need to think about how do we want to show up in the world in the digital landscape (social media)?
• 18:22 – Sam asks the guest about the difference is a personal brand and social selling.
• 20:38 - One can't get his messaging right and accurate until his brand is defined, refined and accurate, says Mary
• 22:34 – The social selling and the brand strategy need to be congruent, and one has to wrap the messaging around the brand and not the other way around.
• 24:52 – The guest points out that we should be starting the conversation on social media the way we do in a normal human environment.
• 26:50 – Mary highlights, if our brand and our messaging are not dialed in, it's going to be very hard to create content.
• 28:08 – What we need to think about when we're creating content is if we're pushing a paradigm, a belief system because no one's interested in our version, shares Mary.
• 31:08 – How do you educate someone who wants to have a personal brand, asks Sam.
• 33:14 – We need to upgrade our LinkedIn profile, design a content strategy that is around, and also bring our personality into it.
• 35:26 – We should be focusing on building our brand currency because that's where we will be judged upon.
• 36:14 - When we're proactive, and commenting on other people's posts and we're writing really meaningful comments in their post, all of their customers are going to see what we just wrote, and they most likely will follow us, says Mary.
• 38:00 – We have to feel comfortable with our subject matter that we understand inside and master it.
• 41:09 – Mary shares the three bugaboos that we just cannot do.
• 43:20 – Sam mentions, we got to formulate the content that we want to be known for.
• 44:23 – If someone is serious about defining their brand, they need to become extremely active on social media, especially LinkedIn, with their clear messaging, states Mary.

Three Key Points

1. We can't build our brand but we can define our bran