What is a Sales Bio?
Your bio is like a wrapper for a candy bar and your expertise is the candy bar itself. In all consumer goods, the packaging is as important as the product.
How can you write a bio that will differentiate you from your competitors and actually scale your revenue?
The perfect bio needs to make you look like an expert and attract the right prospects and customers for your business.
Surprisingly, a lot of my clients struggle to describe who they are and what they do in simple words… Stating that they’re humble!
Being humble, however, has nothing to do with not being confident.
Being humble means that you’re willing to accept feedback and you’re willing to admit you’re wrong. You can still be all that and be supremely confident and that’s what your bio needs to represent. It’s very important to be able to articulate who you are and what you offer to create a bond with your prospects from the first step.
If you have great expertise and profound wisdom and knowledge, but you have a terrible bio, it makes it really hard for people to buy from you because they can’t see that you are an expert.
Your bio needs to tell the world how you have earned the right to talk about whatever you’re talking about.
The Key Components of a Sales Bio
What are the four components of creating a bio that will convert prospects into buying customers?
The first one is a concept that we call drafting or third-party testimonials.
We did a national research study called the “Trends and Personal Branding National Research Study” where we listed out several criteria and asked, “what is the most influential component of a person’s bio that would cause you to buy?”
The options were:
- They have a blog.
- They have done a TED Talk.
- They have a large social media following.
- They have testimonials
- They have a big YouTube channel.
- They are a New York Times bestselling author.
- They’re a self-published author,
and the most important characteristic out of all of them was that they had testimonials from other customers.
If you’re a real expert then there’s a good chance that you have quality testimonials from customers that have had a great experience with you.
When it comes to constructing your bio you should include the names of the people or companies that you have worked with. This way, prospects can build trust by viewing who you’ve worked with.
You’re not faking, lying, or name-dropping, you’re legitimately sharing the caliber of the type of companies and people that you have worked with.
The second thing that a great bio should have is the principle of the greatest common denominator. You might remember this concept from freshmen algebra.
In this case, it just means sharing the names of the most reputable firms or clients that you have worked with and dropping off everybody else.
This doesn’t just apply to the names of the clients that you’ve worked with, but to everything that you have done like your experience and education.
Why?
Because what typically happens is people will automatically fill in information that isn’t there.
If I tell you, I’ve been featured in Good Morning America and Fox News, you automatically assume that every other media platform at that level has featured me or that I tend to be featured in media platforms like that.
The point is, to show the best and forget the rest. We call this portrait view versus panoramic view.
Use portrait view on the things that are really impressive and use panoramic view on the things that you don’t want to put as much detail to.
The third tip to creating a great bio is to talk about problems and pain. Now, what most people do when they write anything marketing-related, is that they talk about the benefits, but what they miss out on is a description of the problems they solve, and specifically the pain that it causes for people.
So if you don’t have a lot of experience, or haven’t worked with a lot of famous companies, use portrait view on the problems and pains you’re solving.
To write a good pain copy you need to find the right words that describe someone’s pain. You need to describe a day in their life, as it exists now, without your solution.
Finally, the fourth part of a great bio is to include quantity.
One of the easiest, simplest, and most tactical ways to immediately enhance your credibility is to speak in terms of volume.
You can talk about the hours of education, the hours of service certification, and the hours of on-the-job training.
Another thing you can talk about is the volume of the people that you reach.
Ask questions like:
How many years/hours have you spent studying this?
How many clients have you worked with?
How many impressions have there ever been of people reading or watching your content?
These 4 additions to your sales will push more clients and prospects towards buying from you instead of the competition.
What else do you think can push your bio to the next level?
