The Importance of Personal Branding in IT Sales
One of the main attributes of a top salesperson in today’s business world is the ability to not act like a gatekeeper while making your sales. Qualifying and converting leads that come your way just won’t cut it anymore. Instead, what makes you a successful sales professional is your ability to position yourself as a go-to resource within your market. The IT landscape is certainly no exception from this rule. To make things a bit simpler, we’ll be looking at one of the key steps to helping in the growth of your brand or company: personal branding.
As an IT salesperson, personalizing your brand will definitely go a long way in developing your business and attracting more customers. The ability to build a personal brand- which will be based on certain factors like your expertise, your wealth of experience, and the level of skills you have as a marketer- will definitely go a long way in showing potential customers the fact that you are a influencer in your field. It will also make you stand out from the pack and set you (and by extension of course, your business) on the path to long-term success that all businesses crave so much.
In order to stand out from other sales pros out there who are endlessly vying for a bigger piece of the market share, you can easily start out by identifying the factors and attributes that you possess that make you a much better guide than your compatriots when it comes to helping your potential customers in navigating through the entire buying process. Look through the considerable attributes that you have which attest to the fact that you are a credible source. In the process, make sure to consider the following:
§ Is it a personal skill such as social selling or pitching?
§ Is it based largely on your experience within a sector?
§ Do you have the ability to share authentic and helpful content with both existing and potential buyers?
In the long-run, you will discover a few advantages that stem from personalizing your business. The most prominent and important of these changes is customer loyalty.
Customer loyalty is something that all companies crave. Essentially, it means that a customer is able to stay with you for a long period of time. Customer loyalty as a concept is built on trust and the degree to which customers share a relatable feeling to your brand or business. These two traits are what a personal business strategy brings. By making your business or brand personal, you are increasing your ability to relate to each customer on a personal level. They are able to come to you with specific issues and you will be able to solve them easily.
As an IT salesperson, you will need to generate a lot of trust in your customers that will see to the fact that they keep coming and a personal brand is one of the surest ways to achieve this. They are able to trust you and actually relate to your brand in such a way that they feel secure and confident in the fact that whatever they need, you’ve got.
The benefits that stem from customer loyalty are:
- Increased Customer Satisfaction: By providing for their needs and serving them effectively, you are ensuring that your customers remain satisfied. In the long-run, it sees to the fact that they always come back to you whenever they need IT-related services.
- Higher Profits: When the amount of customers you are able to serve based on your personal brand increases, it goes without saying that you will experience an increase in clientele size. That translates to increased revenue and far more profits.
- Marketing Efficiency: This point is a bit tied to the former. When you satisfy a customer, there is a high probability that someone else will hear of it. These people go about telling their friends, siblings, and acquaintances about you and how effective you were as well as the customer experience that they had with you. The people they’ve told, due to the desire to experience things themselves, will also come in to see what it is that you offer. When they also see for themselves, then you’re also ensuring that they (or at the very least, a percentage of them) come back at some other point in the near future. What you are doing here is essentially turning your customers into marketers. You are getting an effective marketing strategy…and at no additional cost!
