Enhancing Your Personal Brand: You Are What You Write

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>> Gerhard Gschwandtner: Hi my name is Gerhard Gschwandtner and welcome to Selling Power TV. Today we have the pleasure of continuing our conversation with Deborah Dumaine. She's the founder and CEO of Better Communications. Welcome Deborah.

>> Deborah Dumaine: Thank you.

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Gerhard: So Deborah as a sales person how can I enhance my personal brand through writing?

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Deborah: Every time you send an email, write a proposal or even post to Linked In or Facebook you are creating your personal brand. It's how you come across. It's who you are as a person. Are you easy to work with? Are you friendly? Are you easy to understand? Is your product easy to understand? You want to come across as a trusted advisor not a person just pushing a product. You don't want to sound sloppy or confused. Those all contribute to your personal brand.

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Gerhard: Give me an example.

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Deborah: I received an email the other day. The subject line was request for a meeting, so I thought I'll take a look. There it was it was full of information about the company. It was a company that sold computer services, programming; so it was the background of the company, the products, the achievements, the latest releases. More and more about the company I thought I'm not interested in this company and they don't care about me, they know nothing about me.

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Gerhard: Deborah what do you teach sales people and how they can enhance their brand?

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Deborah: We help them focus on their customers' needs as we discussed in that example there was nothing about me, it was all about them, so that's number one. Another very important thing was matching styles. The reader in a hurry is gonna want a short email. You know people will only read 1 page of an email. Some people only read the preview pane. So if you think you're gonna send a 2 page email and it's gonna get read you may be kidding yourself and if it does get read it's gonna be a long time from now. You want to keep everything clear and in a professional tone. You don't want to say it was awesome, that is not very professional. You don't want to use texting language. The abbreviations . . .

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Gerhard: LOL

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Deborah:. . . like Lol. I mean you wouldn't do that with a prospect. We're talking about getting in front of prospects but you might use IMO, in my opinion. That's not very professional. I wouldn't want to see that in an introductory letter and last don't make grammar mistakes. If you say it will go really good, or her and I are gonna have a meeting next week, those are incorrect and if you're not sure about it you should have someone else read your email for you

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Gerhard: And always spell check.

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Deborah: Always spell check. Proofing is the last thing. If there's an error in a number or if you spell your customers name wrong or leave the previous customers name in the letter, have you ever done that?

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Gerhard: Yeah.

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Deborah: That's the end of the deal. So these things make a huge difference in your personal brand.

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Gerhard: Deborah can you share an example where a personal writing brand has made a difference in a sale?

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Deborah: There's a person in our company her name is Dorothy and she has an amazing story to tell about a customer who she was trying to connect with. The person wouldn't take a meeting, wouldn't talk on the phone but would occasionally respond to an email. Dorothy patiently emails her regularly and eventually the customer wrote and said she wanted to buy. Dorothy was delighted and said why? The customer said you're emails were different, they focused on me, they showed you cared about me. They were friendly. They were a little bit personal and I felt that there was a real person behind them. Your authentic self came through.

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Gerhard: That's a wonderful story.

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Deborah: It really is.

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Gerhard: Because it also illustrates that the people make decisions of a certain period of time and when you have an email relationship that has a consistent tone then people respond to that favorably.

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Deborah: Exactly. So pay attention to your personal brand it makes a huge difference.

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Gerhard: Deborah I want to thank you for sharing this information because this is so important especially in this fast moving world and anybody who would like to get more information on Deborah and her services go to the website listed on the screen.

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Gerhard: Thank you so much.

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Deborah: Thank you Gerhard.

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==== Transcribed by Automatic Sync Technologies ====