3 Things to Keep in Mind While Building Your Personal Brand

My conversation with Ray Higdon brought together three of my favorite things, sales, personal branding, and network marketing.

Today I’ll go over the three major takeaways I got from my interview with Higdon and why I think these are things you NEED to keep in mind while building your personal brand.

 

Be Duplicatable

The first key takeaway is to be “duplicatable.”

One of the best lessons you can learn from network marketing is that if you can teach someone else how to sell something, you can duplicate that process over and over and that’ll let you focus on other less teachable parts of your business.

Even with your personal brand, everything needs to be duplicatable in order to become scaleable.

Those of you that are Brand Builders members know that we use a content marketing strategy called the “Content Diamond.”

This system is just a giant checklist that our team goes through to generate weeks or even months worth of content from just one video. Once one video is done we move on to the next one and so on.

Being duplicatable is being able to have many people step in interchangeable parts of your system. And that’s exactly what our Content Diamond system does for your content strategy and that’s what you should aim to do with every part of your business.

We also talk about this in Eight Figure Entrepreneur, one of our four major programs. And one of the flagship points from this program is how custom fails and standard scales.

Why is McDonald’s one of the most successful franchises in the world?

It’s because it’s designed to be run by the person with the lowest level of skill.

It’s created for the least common denominator. It has the most explicit and specific “instruction manual” that ANYONE can follow.

And if anyone can follow it then the potential for scaling successfully is crazy.

Think of your brand or business as a manufacturing line.

A manufacturing line works because it’s cranking out the same thing over and over again.

That is how you scale.

You might be thinking, “No no, no, I don’t want to be the I don’t want to be the Honda Accord of personal brands, I want to be the Rolls Royce and I want every single thing to be custom and handcrafted.”

But even Rolls Royce has great processes, streamlines, and checklists. You can’t build a great brand without being duplicatable. You have to be able to do things on autopilot over and over and over.

This reminds me of my TED Talk about How to Multiply Your Time which stemmed from my book Procrastinate on Purpose.

One of the flagship sayings in there is, “Automation is to your time exactly what compounding interest is to your money.”

It is investing in creating a system or a process that can be stamped out on repeat. If you want to become a successful entrepreneur, you NEED to be thinking like that. That’s how you free yourself up, you replace yourself with a process.

Focus on What You Can Control 

The second takeaway for me is when Ray said, “If I had big goals, I should have a prospecting number. And then I should have a marketing metric of something to focus on.”

For example, he said, “If I had big goals, I would be doing three reels a day.”

And there’s a couple things I love about this.

The high level concept here is you need to focus on what you can control and remind yourself that your job is to do the things you can do.

I believe in that concept a lot and we wrote about it in, Take the Stairs, my first New York Times Best Seller.

We say, “Put your self esteem into your work habits, not into your results.”

Let the results be a byproduct of the work.

The thing that I loved about this and the little nuance flip that switched for me was that it applies to marketing and it definitely applies to sales. It’s a survival mechanism in sales.

We tell people not to focus on how many people say yes, just focus on how many people you’re going to talk to in a certain number of hours.

One of my old friends, Andrea Waltz, wrote this book called Go for No and the mentality there was to aim for 20 no’s.

And by aiming for 20 no’s, you’ll end up with more yeses than if you were just focused on the yeses.

The cool thing is that the same mentality applies for marketing for personal brands, especially for social media.

If all you’re focused on is how many views, followers, likes, and comments, none of that is in your control.

You can influence those things by altering the quality of the content that you put out. But the better thing to focus on is the quantity.

The right quantity typically leads to the right quality.

So when Ray was saying, “I would focus on making three reels a day,” that’s a great metric to focus on.

A great way to think about it is to go, “What is the volume of output you’re going to do every day?”

Focus on the activity, not the results.

What activity is that for you?

Marketing v. Sales

Finally, my third takeaway is marketing is long term, sales is short term.

Marketing and sales are both good to focus on, but marketing is typically building trust with the masses and building an audience.

The good news is that it’s extremely scalable.

Once you hit the tipping point, people just start flooding to you. And it just gets better and better and better.

But marketing isn’t the fastest way to get results.

Rory Vaden quote

Sales is a human to human conversation.

I can pick up the phone, talk to somebody today, and make a sale.

I just need to convince one person.

That’s the beauty of sales.

The bad news of sales is that while sales is fast, it’s not super scalable. The way you get around that is you go through what we teach in Scale Your Sales.

Which is how to recruit, train, and manage a motivated sales team.

The other problem is that a lot of people are uncomfortable selling.

They don’t know how to prospect.

They don’t know how to ask for referrals.

They’re not comfortable asking for the sale.

They don’t know how to do it.

And by the way, if that’s you, you need to request a call with Brand Builders Group and go through our Pressure Free Persuasion course where we teach all of that step-by-step.

Now despite marketing being slow, marketing can really shorten the sales cycle. Because if somebody comes to you already “pre-sold,” that’s going to accelerate your sale.

And part of the magic at Brand Builders Group is we do both, marketing and sales.

We use marketing to warm up the leads and bring them in to make the sale and then we work through referrals.

That’s why we’ve been able to build very successful businesses very fast.

So both marketing and sales work.

They’re both good.

But they both serve different purposes.

And you have to figure out which one is your strength, which one is your weakness, and how you can incorporate both of them together. Because marketing is slow and sales is fast.

Marketing is long term, sales are short term.

But marketing is scalable.

And sales is more of a grind.

And if you’re gonna build a great business and personal brand, you want to be friends with both.

You want to be really good at both marketing and sales.

And the better you are at those two things, the easier everything else becomes.

So maybe you need to request a FREE CALL with our team if you want us to show you our process for creating a marketing and sales plan for your business.

To wrap things up, remember these three key takeaways:

 

  1. Be duplicatable.
  2. Put self esteem into your work habits, not your results.
  3. Marketing is long term and sales is short term. Learn how to do both.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Follow Rory On Social

Get Rory’s “High Earner Habits” training for FREE when you sign up to receive his weekly blog updates via email.

0 Shares
Share via
Copy link