Standing out in Sales: How to Start Building Your Personal Brand on LinkedIn

People buy from whom they know, like and trust.
And that’s one of the many reasons why a salesperson
will want to build their brand on LinkedIn.
And we’re going to talk about that on this episode of Closing Time.
Thanks for tuning into Closing Time the show for go to market leaders.
My name is Chip House.
I’m CMO at Insightly CRM and I’m joined today,
very excited about having Kyle. Coleman, who’s SVP of marketing from Clari
which is a revenue platform that helps you monitor team performance.
So welcome to the show, Kyle.
Thanks for having me, Chip.. I’m really excited to be here.
Yeah, excited to dig into this topic.
I mean, here we are.
It’s kind of meta, many people will see us on LinkedIn talking about this, but
we’re talking about building your brand, building your personal brand on LinkedIn.
And it’s something that I think you know a thing or two about.
You’ve been at this for a
period of time and you have over 100,000 followers.
So I would just love to learn a bit more about your journey.
I know that LinkedIn is also rated you a top voice as well,
so I’d love to learn more about that program as well.
Can you share that information with us?
Yeah, sure thing.
So I am super honored by LinkedIn a couple of years back to be
chosen as a top voice.
I don’t exactly know what the criteria are to be chosen as a top voice.
I think it has something to do with post frequency and reach and things like that.
And the company that I was in was certainly an honor.
So very thankful and grateful for all of that.
My approach to LinkedIn, Chip, and the reason that I started doing
it was because I,. I genuinely love helping people.
I know that sounds pretty lame, but it really is true
and I started thinking about the impact that I was able to make
at my previous role or my previous company Looker.
I had a team of about 70 SDRs. And then when I moved over to Clari,
downsized a bit.. I had a team of five SDRs.
And as much fun as it was working with them, I was like, Man,
if I’m able to help all of these folks, what could I,
how many more people could I help in a more broad based forum on LinkedIn?
And so I started just all the common questions that I would
get from the SDR team and all the programs and processes that we would create.
I would basically just try and
write it down and put it on LinkedIn and see if it helped people.
And it seems to have so things as foundational
as how to write good emails, how to make good cold calls,
all those sorts of things, to things a bit more philosophical about the mindset
that you have to have to be successful in sales
and the way you need to think about
career development and then everything in between.
And so I’m really grateful that so many people seem to resonate
with the lessons and the learnings that I try and share.
And I genuinely enjoy doing it.
It doesn’t feel like a chore to me,
so I intend to keep doing it as long as I can.
Yeah, that’s awesome.
So what year did you actually start getting super active in LinkedIn then, Kyle?
January of 2020, right before the pandemic.
Okay.
Do you know how many followers you had then?
I had 2500.
Okay. Yeah.
So you were like a typical person
basically on LinkedIn with about 2500 connections?
Yeah, I had.
I had maybe written an article or two posted every now
and again, but had never really committed to doing it.
And it was a bit of a slow burn.
It took some time to gain some traction, but ultimately the benefits of it.
I know we’re going to talk about this later.
The benefits are personal as well.
I gain a lot of value in, you know,
sitting down, really thinking through concepts
and then trying to crystallize them in a way that’s digestible for folks.
So it’s mutually beneficial.
And the forcing function of
thinking and writing clearly has really helped me in my career.
Yeah,
I think that’s a super good point, we can just drill into it now, because,
you know, posting may not be for everybody depending on who your ICP is.
And so, for example, we tend to sell. Insightly to go to market teams, right?
So the bulk of our intended audience is here on LinkedIn.
So it makes sense for us to produce this kind of content.
And so I assume you’re approaching it sort of similarly.
And so when you sit down to write, like you said, it’s
a forcing function to get your ideas out, get your thoughts out,
which can be super helpful, especially for
a salesperson, right? Right.
The way that I think about it, Chip, is there are for me
and this is different for other folks, but for me
there are three main reasons to post on LinkedIn.
One is to elevate the profession, elevate the sales profession, try
and do away with some of the kind of shadier tactics
and the things
that people really shouldn’t be doing that give salespeople a bad reputation, help
train people on the right way to do it, to elevate the profession.
So that’s that’s number one.
Number two is recruiting.
It’s been amazing how many people or how much our recruiting funnel
has been filled by people that have seen or interacted with my post or whatever
it may be.
And it’s not just SDRs it’s AEs, it’s marketing people, it’s engineers,
it’s product managers.
It’s all people that learn about Clari via the things that not just myself
but other members of our team put out on LinkedIn.
And that’s a pretty cool benefit.
And then the third, and I think a pretty distant third
is selling like selling things on LinkedIn
is not the main reason for doing things, but it’s a nice byproduct
because my target audience, Clari’s target audience is on LinkedIn.
We sell to salespeople, we sell to marketing people.
So it makes sense for myself and other Clarians to be active
on LinkedIn because we’re going to hopefully experience
that tertiary benefit of actually building some demand.
For people or companies whose target audience are not super active
on LinkedIn, you may still be able to check
boxes, number one and number two, and that’s great.
But if you expect to like build this healthy pipeline of deals
and things like that and your audience isn’t there,
you’re tricking yourself, you’re fooling yourself.
And so you’ve got to be mindful of that, be cognizant of that, and just make sure
you’re posting for the right reasons and setting the right goals.
Yeah, it makes great sense, actually.
And so I think, you know, what we talk about with our sales team is, you know,
hey, there’s huge power in developing your personal brand on LinkedIn.
And of course we get the question, well, what do I post?
And so I know that in the last 24 hours, for example, you posted about the top
four books you’ve read recently, and some were sort of business oriented.
One was about Kobe Bryant I saw.
And then, you know, legacy.
I know that you have a very popular post about your career path.
So you’re sharing things both personal in addition
to trying to speak to your audience, right?
That’s right.
And the thing I, the guidance that I try and give to people is post
about things that either you have experience in
and have a real meaningful point of view on and have proven success
doing some things, tactics, ways of thinking, whatever it may be.
So experience is hugely beneficial.
And if you think about your own career, there are situations that you’ve been in
that are interesting to people and you just need to tease them out
and tell the story in a unique way.
What’s one thing that earlier in your career you learned from experience?
What did you learn?
How did you learn it and why?
Or how could it be helpful to other people?
So leaning into your own experience and finding interesting points
from your own career journey is this very deep well of content
that you can try and pick from to,
you know, have some sort of meaningful impact on social.
So experience is one.. And then the second is expertise.
And the two are not necessarily the same thing.
Expertise has more to do with how have you, it’s more
tactical maybe, but how have you found success in the past?
What are the things that you have done or that you’ve seen other people do that
you’ve worked with that are best practices that can or should be repeated?
And why?
Why are they and how is that different from what other people do?
And so those are the two main veins that. I try and tap with respect to my post.
Things that I have genuine experience with or genuine expertise
in that way there’s credibility and it’s genuine.
And it’s not me just kind of spouting off on things
that I don’t totally know or don’t totally understand.
So that’s the way that I try and think about things.
And then I would say maybe a third benefit and something that I am very lucky is
I get to speak with some of the world’s leading operators
across revenue and marketing and product teams and the rest of it.
So I’m constantly learning from these luminaries in the field
and I try and summarize their thoughts and share those thoughts
and as best I can, and of course giving them full credit along the way.
So that’s maybe the third vein is like curating insights
from other people who have experience or expertise
in another forum and trying to share their thoughts a bit more publicly.
Of course, giving them credit along the way.
So those are kind of the ways,
that’s how I would recommend people start is thinking through those two channels.
And it’s, I think, pretty easy to get on a roll if you’re just kind of
narrowing the scope of what you can or should be posting about.
Yeah.
So, you know, for example, we’ve had Jay Baer on the program
and Jay talks about how you need to be authentic, number one.
But people do business with people that they want to engage
with, people that are human, people that are authentic like that.
And so it may be your hobby that might be more interesting to people.
In the case of Jay Baer,
he talks about marketing and customer success and customer experience,
but he also talks about tequila, you know,. And so I think that’s super interesting.
On the side, I’m a drummer
and so I’ve talked a little bit about drums, but I don’t I don’t think
the bulk of the audience wants to hear about me talking about drumming.
But I think there actually are some ties in,
you know, to what I do day to day.
But so an individual sales rep, as they’re building their brand,
they want to think about if I’m kind of restating what you said, you know,
what problems do they know about, do they have passion about,
or what things that they know about and have passion about?
And then, in addition to, where does that sort of coincide
with their target audience, correct?
That’s exactly right.
And if you can find that middle ground, like a lot of folks, Chip,
for whatever reason, just like you just said about drumming,
you trick yourself into thinking that people won’t find it interesting.
You know, I’m just a drummer or I’m just an AE or I’m just an SDR,
whatever it may be.
And you, you make excuses for yourself
to not sit down and really think about
what do you know and how can you apply that and be helpful to other people.
Like you’re just basically creating excuses for yourself to not do it,
as opposed to saying, Man,. I just went through
a 700 day sales cycle, an enterprise deal.
Let me think back over the last two years, what did I learn and how can I summarize
those two years into, you know, a thousand characters?
That’s a hard task, and I guarantee it’s, again, mutually beneficial.
If you sit down and you do that and you write through the main obstacles
that you face, how you overcame those obstacles,
how you got the deal across the line, and you tell that deal story,
you’re going to be helping yourself
because you going to be better suited for the next time this comes around
and you’re going to be genuinely interesting to a lot of people
that are going through something very similar right now.
So there are a million reasons
that you could always trick yourself into not sitting down and doing something, but
just know that the things that you do know and the things that you care about
are interesting to other people and are applicable to other people.
You just have to tell the story well.
I mean, what you just said there, Kyle it’s a forcing function
and it’s a way to get your thoughts out on paper.
And it’s interesting to me
how important writing as a skill has become for salespeople.
It’s always been, I think has been important for marketing people.
But it’s just emerging, whether it’s cadences or now, social engagement
where writing is a critical skill to have as a sales person.
And so
how do you guide a sales person?
Should they put time in the calendar and do it every day?
Or, you know, in addition to posting, what else can they do?
You’re totally right, Chip.
Writing is critical and clear writing is clear thinking.
And so this act of writing
is to make you a better communicator and make you a better thinker.
It’s really, really important.
I can’t stress enough how beneficial this journaling or social
journaling or whatever you want to call
it has been for me to crystallize thoughts and become a better communicator.
And a lot of salespeople
know that this is true through the lens of verbal storytelling.
You know, a lot of sales training has to do with
how can I be a better storyteller, whether it’s in a demo circumstance
or asking the right discovery questions or whatever it may be.
And there’s a lot of focus on verbal communication.
There should be and has to be in this digital age,
as much of a focus for sellers on written communication.
And there is no shortcut here.
There’s no secret sauce, like you can’t go to chatGPT
and it’s not going to make you a better writer.
The writing that comes out of AI bots right now anyway, is garbage.
So you can’t just rely on that.
You need to genuinely practice.
So there’s again, no shortcut.
You have to read a lot and you have to write a lot and that’s it.
And you have to get feedback from people and really be critical.
You know, am I communicating clearly, effectively?
Don’t just sit down, write for 10 minutes and then post that thing on LinkedIn.
The way that I work is I write a draft and then I spend a lot more time
editing and wordsmithing and looking at how does it look, how does it sound?
Is there a good rhythm to this writing?
Is this line going to entice somebody to read the next line
and being really thoughtful about that and getting into that habit, and learning
what good writing sounds like is really, really important.
So there are a million resources out there for effective copywriting.
Nothing beats practice, reading a lot, writing a lot, and it just takes time.
It’s like any other muscle.
You’re not going to go out and run a six
minute mile today if you’ve never run before.
But if you go out every day, commit to it,
you start just by walking around the block.
You know, over time you’ll get to that.
You’ll get to that goal.
So you just have to start somewhere.
Yeah, building on that. So Lao Tzu has the
famous
quote that a thousand mile journey begins with your first step.
And I love that.
And because it seems so daunting to begin this,
and so why don’t we have that be
the final question here, Kyle, I’m going to ask you if I’m a sales rep
and I really want to do this, but I’ve been procrastinating,
what’s the first thing that I can do to kick myself in the pants.
Get an accountabilibuddy, get somebody inside of your company
or outside your company who has similar aspirations and similar reservations
and hold each other accountable in a couple of different ways.
One, shake hands, say, Yes, we’re doing this together.
Okay, cool.
Two, set real goals, real, meaningful goals.
You do not need to post something every single day on LinkedIn.
You don’t have to do it, once a week is fine.
Start there and get over some of the, you know, anxiety that you may have about
sharing your thoughts publicly by having your your partner in crime here,
review your stuff before you post it, give you notes,
give you feedback, read things, and then say, does it flow right?
Are you being clear about what you’re trying to communicate?
And just work together to do it.
It’s hard to do alone if you have somebody who can be an accountability partner
for you, you’re going to be more successful
and your content is probably going to improve as a result.
It slows things down a little bit, but it’s intentional that it slows things
down.
It’ll give you more confidence that what you’re writing is worth reading.
And so that that would be my advice to start find somebody
that you trust, that you respect and go tackle together.
I love that. I’ve never heard that before. The accountabilibuddy.
I think. I took that from a South Park episode.
So inspiration comes from everybody.
Even better.
Cartman Yeah, that’s amazing.
Well, Kyle, any final thoughts?
This has been great. Thank you.
Yeah, of course.
I think we’ve said it all, so it’s been a pleasure, Chip.
Okay, Well, thanks so much and thanks to all of you for tuning in to Closing Time
and we’ll look forward to seeing you next time.
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