Nobody knows you

I keep meeting people who impress me with their wisdom. Exactly the kind of expertise the world should be in on. Actionable knowledge, the stuff that makes a difference, if only it were wide-spread. When I ask these modern-day savants why they don’t share their learnings beyond their realm of friends and colleagues, though, they usually answer me with a shrug. I’m not the best, they say, so who would care? Or: there are people out there who are much smarter than I am.

In fairness, that’s true. These people I’m talking about may not be the ultimate best. But why should that hold anyone back from speaking up? That’s nonsense. And it’s precisely why nobody knows them.

So yes, you’re right if you think there probably is someone out there who is much smarter and much better than you at what you do. Let’s assume there is this authority on the subject, publishing book after book. Does that mean there isn’t any room left for you? Chances are you’re imagining this expert to be faster, bolder and better than you. But why focus on them? And if you’re not sure if this spot is already taken, then why couldn’t it be you that’s publishing all this content on the subject?

It’s not about being the best person, nor the first. It’s about starting somewhere. Look at the companies that are scaling fast; none of them were originally the best. What they did was take an idea and perfect it. Apple did not invent the computer. But they excelled in their execution of it, turning it into a personal computer. They added a mouse, a visual interface, a touch screen and so on. Tesla didn’t invent the car, nor the battery. Yet they are now aiming for Mars, literally. All those big ones have had to start somewhere. And so do you. Because if you don’t start, you’ll never know what possibilities are out there.

Nobody cares

The next reason why nobody knows you, is because you think nobody cares about your ideas, about your knowledge or even about you as a person. You could be right or wrong there. But as long as your prospective audience doesn’t know you, there is no way to tell. If you give them content that enables them to solve some of their problems, and if you give them this knowhow without asking for anything in return, then they will care about you. And at a later stage, they will knock on your door to solve their next problem.

You will care about them, too. This book is not about building profit just to boost your revenue. Sure, amounts with extra zeroes at the end are nice. But it would be nicer still if what you did made real sense. If that money was earned in a way that makes you proud. If the money was all thanks to your abilities. If it was deserved. Sharing your knowledge is a way to do that. Believe me, there is nothing more fulfilling, more rewarding than somebody coming up to you to say that because of you; their world has changed. Because of your post, they reinvented their business. Because of you, their idea was a hit.

I care. I wrote this book because I do. After meeting so many founders, execs, freelancers and other business profiles, I realised I cared. I want all of you to win. I want your idea to make it big. And I want the people who should know about you to know about you. To trust you. And to help you grow your business.

It’s not about the loudest voice

A few years ago, I ran a large sales team in the Netherlands. One of the sales guys on my team was the type that comes across as extremely confident. He had an answer to everything and was vocal on his opinions, manipulating an entire meeting so it looked like he was the one to control it all. Turned out he didn’t: at the end of the day, his numbers weren’t quite on a par with his image. He taught me a valuable lesson: the ones who shout the loudest aren’t always the ones who are right.

So when you see a video, read a book or see someone on stage, look beyond the pose. Know that them being out there, looking confident, is a question of mastering certain techniques. Learn the techniques. Leverage them. And apply them to grow your own business.

This book was not written to tell you how to become a guru in seven simple steps. I’ve met tons of gurus and only rarely have I been impressed with their unique knowledge. I have, however, been impressed with the methods and systems they use to spread their message and reach millions of people. And that, much like looking confident on stage, is something you can learn. It is a technique, that is all.

These pages aren’t about pursuing fame. They’re about building a strong personal brand, one that you can apply to what you want to do, be it running a business or running for president. Because if you want to build or grow any type of business, you will need to make sure your potential customers know about you. And you do that by helping them reach their goals, which in turn you achieve by sharing your knowledge, or your team’s. In the end, it’s the one who creates value for his customers who wins.

So if you want to scale your business, you’ll have to leverage your expertise. And your expertise is made of the stuff you’re interested in. It’s what matters to you. It’s what you care about. It’s what you’re passionate about. In short: it’s you. So why wonder who it is you want to be? Since it’s your knowledge that will be the basis of your personal brand, who else can you be; but you?

Start with who: the company or you

I was recently asked by a large retail brand to host a workshop on social selling. I had the entire sales and marketing team sitting in front of me. Just as I was about to kick off, the head of marketing asked if she could give a short introduction. ‘It’s a pleasure to welcome Michael to inspire and educate all of you on social selling,’ she said. ‘Our goal is for you to leverage these learnings to acquire new customers. To streamline this communication, we’ve put together a board-approved charter with guidelines on how to act on social media. Safe to say we’ve agreed to adhere to only the highest standards. Let’s have a look.’

Next, we all had to sit through a twenty-minute list of what not to do on social media, followed by another ten minutes of explaining how to get your post approved if by any chance you still felt a need to be vocal. She wrapped up by saying: ‘Enjoy the training, we are all looking forward to see you find new customers.’ Believe me, motivation levels were soaring.

I have seen this attitude over and over again, rearing its ugly head in most sizable companies. While the intention is to uphold quality standards and ensure uniformity, it drains employees of their enthusiasm.

But if the employees are tongue-tied, then who should do the talking? Who should be on social media? Who should the customers know? Is it the people in the company, or the company itself? To understand them, we need to crawl into the minds of these companies on the one hand, and their employees on the other.

How companies think

Whether it’s the marketing department that calls the shots or the communication team, their job is to be on top of everything brand-related. Campaigns, visuals, designs, ads, social media posts, you name it. If the company logo is on there, it’s their responsibility.

1.We have to protect the brand at all costs. Every word and every image put out by the company needs to match the highest corporate standards.

2.We need to be consistent in all brand expressions. When in doubt, check the style guide. It will tell you about the use of company colours, the tone of voice, where to put the logo and how big.

3.The content needs to be approved by marketing and/or communication. This will take time, but it’s better to be safe than sorry. Then, it needs to be approved by the legal department to make sure we don’t run into any legal issues.

4.We select a few individuals who can act as a spokesperson for the company. They, and only they, can speak out about the company in their own name and will be thoroughly trained in their role as a certified mouthpiece.

5.Everything we say is meant to show how fantastic our product/service is, and how great it is to work here. In concreto, this means we talk about a new product or service we’re launching, a mention in the news, prizes we’ve won, events we’re hosting etcetera. Each tweet is part of our employer branding programme.

And so on. All these rules have one thing in common: they are about controlling each and every form of communication and rooting out anything that doesn’t match the carefully curated company brand. They are about grooming and maintaining an image for the outside world. Usually, these rules grow organically: an issue pops up and the company decrees a rule to prevent the chaos from spreading. The motto: contain and control. And that makes sense, just like most of the rules themselves make sense.

However, this is a defensive approach, aimed at protecting a company’s assets and market share. It’s a traditional way of going about things–but not necessarily the most efficient one. In terms of high performance and growth, companies clinging to this approach risk being outsmarted by a newer, faster, digital-savvy generation. In a world where scaling your communication at the global level costs peanuts and can (more or less) be executed by anyone with a smartphone, the control obsession has become obsolete. Control makes you slow. It breeds rigidity. At times when every company’s looking to be agile, it’s trust rather than control you should be shooting for. Plus, taking the control thing too far will affect your brand. It creates negative employer branding and–worse–bland content.

How employees think

While companies care to protect what’s theirs, employees, CEOs and freelancers think and act as individuals, meaning they have very different motives when using their personal social accounts to talk about their brand.

2.Maybe I don’t like the products my company is selling. Can I identify with a coffee brand when I’m really a tea drinker myself?

3.If I trade places within the company, or go to work for another company altogether, how does that influence what I post online?

4.Let’s say I start posting about things I find interesting. How will I manage the workload? Will I need to post in the evening? How do I balance my private life versus my company life?

5.Which tools and channels should I use and what to use them for? What if I have a following on TikTok but the business finds it an inappropriate platform?

I see these same points come up at every training. Their common denominator is fear. People are afraid of what will happen when they voice their opinion or share their knowledge. They fear their work will spill over into their personal time. They are frightened to put themselves out there, paralysed by what others might think or the possibility of their posts going viral and eating up their privacy.

I tell them to rest assured: overnight successes are extremely rare, statistically speaking. It takes time to get noticed and be trusted. But while building a receptive audience is time-consuming, that doesn’t mean it’s not worth the effort. Much to the contrary.

The people or the company?

We haven’t yet answered the question of who is most relevant: the people, or the company?

During holidays, I tend to go (almost) offline for a while to rethink my strategy. A few summers ago, I switched off social media completely and focused on building new content. After seven weeks of silence, I wrote my first post on LinkedIn.

I posted this to my personal profile, basically selling a workshop. I didn’t even mention my company. A few days after posting, I checked my company website’s statistics. This is what I saw:

I was amazed. I had posted on my personal account, but people who read it had gone on to visit the company website. I was intrigued. Over the next couple of years, I did a lot of experimenting, sometimes posting as a person, sometimes as a company, just to measure the impact. I found my personal posts had the same effect, time and time again. Experience teaches me that there is a direct correlation between what you post as a person and the impact this has on visits to the company page, registrations to webinars and the amount of meetings you’re invited to… the lot.

If the correlation between personal posts and traffic to the company website is a given, then I figured there must be ways to leverage this traction. Ways to scale the trust these people had put in me–and consequently in my company–and put it into a model. A scalable one, too, that can generate much more revenue and attract customers.

These statistics were gathered by LinkedIn in 2018. Them being responsible for 64% of all visits to corporate websites is truly insane. If you were still wondering whether it’s a channel you should leverage for your business, there’s your answer.

How helping employees build their personal brand will help your company

By Koen Stevens, CEO at Ambassify

Koen Stevens knows about personal brands. As the founder and CEO of Ambassify, he helps companies drive their sales, playing on brand advocacy and helping them using social proof. His vision is what got him clients like Barco, Allianz and Swiss Life. And his vision is exactly what he’ll be sharing in this guest article.

Back in 2018, our customer KBC wanted to reach out and let the world know that they would be the very first Belgian bank to offer their customers the possibility to chat directly with them through WhatsApp. Typically, a firm would proceed by allocating a very decent amount of money to a communication campaign. Next, an advertising strategy would see the light of day.

Not this time though, as KBC decided to change strategies. By asking a small segment of their employees to help and spread the word through their social channels, they generated nearly 24,000 clicks leading to an article on their website, spending absolutely nothing on media. What’s the average cost-per-click within your industry? You do the maths.

As Michael points out in this book: trust is the new currency. When employees share their employer’s content online, they generate eight times the engagement the message would receive if it had been posted on the brand’s regular channels. I am sure you’ve noticed how the numbers change when you post the same content on LinkedIn through your company page versus your personal page.

Fact is; people like to hear from other people. As humans, we tend to put our trust in our peers, in people exactly like us. What I am saying is simple: encourage your employees to take the stage when it comes to representing your company’s brand. Help them build their personal brand and your company will benefit from their success in the long run.

Sticking together when circumstances push us apart

Two years down the road, it’s 2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic has shaken things up for business leaders across the globe. While they still want to genuinely connect with their employees, things have changed. That jaw-dropping office building with all its perks has lost most of its importance overnight. Long gone now are the hours spent in a meeting with the COO of a well-respected media company, him being mostly busy discussing the exact location for the new office building with his assistant.

While company culture remains essential to forge a bond between a company and its employees, the rules of how to keep those employees on board have changed for sure. Maintaining a meaningful relationship between both parties while kicking the aspect of physical togetherness out of the equation, is quite the challenge. Today, employees are working from different locations and the office isn’t necessarily their second home anymore. That’s why it is now more important than ever to keep employee engagement at the highest possible level.

To protect its employees, customers, and families, Belgian fashion retailer JBC decided to close its stores even before the government issued a policy closing all non-essential shops. Ever since they’ve existed, this family business has been close to its employees and customers. During this challenging period, the company again underlined the importance of caring for their employees’ well-being by working out a process with Ambassify to guide, motivate them, inform them, and keep them involved with the company.

A great example is the weekly personal video mail the company’s CEO shared with his employees. When there was no physical way to meet, this small but consistent act gave the people at JBC a sense of perspective. While it was still video and long-distance, this carefully recorded message didn’t feel to them like the umpteenth Zoom room with a failing internet connection and a hundred other employees. That sense of proximity to the company is essential in retaining your employees’ trust during difficult times.

Go for a dialogue, not a monologue

The biggest mistake I see in companies’ employee engagement strategies is that they focus on push communication alone. Please, use and don’t abuse your employees. Your communication should evolve to push and pull, a two-way relationship with mutual respect. If you’re in charge, let your employees take part in the decisions your company makes. Empower them. This way, you’ll drastically increase the chances that they’ll return the favour by becoming your best brand advocates. This principle of reciprocity is classic Cialdini–exactly what the marketing master described in his first book, Principles, back in 1984.

At Ambassify, we’ve done some research on the topic. Turns out asking employees to constantly push your company’s content comes with a short-term spike in social shares. Ultimately, though, they result in diminished engagement and a decrease in employee-content interactions. This ‘social sharing fatigue’ phenomenon can eventually lead to an advocate drop-off of 34% in just two years.

Here are a few ideas to open up your communication channels and encourage your employees to remain tuned in to your content:

•Use surveys and polls – ask employees what they want to share on social and what kind of perks and rewards they’d like to get for sharing. Act on the information you’ve collected. Don’t let that data gather dust or you’ll appear tone-deaf to employee needs and wants.

•Ask for content submissions – this can be original employee content, posts they’ve enjoyed reading or articles they’ve learned something from, as long as they’re industry specific.

•Don’t shy away from big asks – asking employees to leave a review on Glassdoor or something similarly big can seem intimidating, but it works when it comes to mixing things up. Don’t do it too often, but also don’t be afraid to pull the trigger every once in a while.

Find your coalition of the willing

One of our smaller US customers, Revival Animal, runs an employee advocacy programme with just fifty advocates, which works as the perfect example of the impact of this two-way strategy. When they started out, they focused on the opinion of their employee community by going for small asks–things like ‘what should we serve on our next team BBQ’ or ‘which good cause will we be supporting this year’. When going in for the kill and asking for an indeed.com review, they got fifteen new reviews, which accounted for a 300% increase. Just imagine a third of your employees writing a genuine review on Indeed or Glassdoor. Now think about how this would influence your business as well as your employer branding strategy.

Content shared by employees sees 8x more social engagement

A question I get asked a lot is whether companies should involve each and every employee or customer in their advocacy programme. The short answer is no. The longer answer is that there are mechanisms you can use to identify your best advocates. We’ve developed a funnelling framework where a company will use their internal or external databases and test potential advocates by asking them for small things (i.e. sharing content, giving their input on a new logo, suggesting where the next team gathering should be…). We call this behaviour-driven advocacy: these employees don’t intend to become an advocate. However, their behaviour proves that in reality, they are. These are the people you should focus on. This is your coalition of the willing.

Typically, this group covers between 10 to 15% of the total employees of a company in a first wave. What all these employees have in common, is that they want to be heard and feel that they belong to something larger. They want to build their social status and increase their social capital. We do use leaderboards and gamification to incentivise them, but a funny thing we notice here is that quite a few people will never claim their reward: they just don’t want to drop in the ranking from spot 3 to spot 33. Use this knowledge to your advantage!

So start building your advocacy right here, with that base of 10 to 15% of your employees. Start small, but start today, as the dataset you’ll be building is something your competitors can’t copy!

Why you are your biggest problem

Over the years, I’ve spoken to thousands of people from the stage. I’ve given all of them a blueprint to scale their business. A perfectly usable how-to guide, proven to work. However, only a handful of them went on to actually use it. Even when the proof was hurting their eyes, even when I offered to do it for them, they were stuck in limbo, unable to translate intentions into actions.

A lot of you think that you are not worthy. You think you have nothing to say. You’re convinced the company you are working for or the one you’re building is way more interesting than you are. You’re sure when you say it’s not about you. You’re wrong.

Companies are made of people, and it’s their people who tell stories. In fact, some of the biggest companies out there are synonymous with their founders. Think of Amazon and you think of Jeff Bezos. Tesla? Elon Musk. Apple? Forever Steve Jobs. It’s true for the big ones, but it’s equally true for your CEOs of much smaller companies who are synonymous with their brand.

If you are going to grow your business, you will have to be prepared to swim across the lake of rejection. When people ask me what the difference is between somebody starting a business and someone scaling it, I think it comes down to three things:

The first hurdle towards growing your business is getting past yourself. The first ‘no’ to negotiate is your own ego.

How to stop talking about you

Clearly, it should be you! So why are all these execs, marketeers and sales reps talking about who they are, what they do, how great their company is, what their product is and so on?

Take company videos, the ultimate piece of marketing machinery, manufactured to ooze a company’s message and lure in leads. Most of them go like this: drone shot of a nice building. Camera zooms in on the building. There’s the CEO in a suit, saying ‘20 years ago I had an idea’ and rambling on for two more minutes. Meanwhile, shots of smiling customers and people in meeting rooms with pristine shirts who point at screens a lot.

Except for the CEO and the board members, virtually no one will look at this video. And they shouldn’t, because it’s irrelevant. It’s all ‘we, we, we, we, we, we’.

This type of communication will never work, yet we are persistent in keeping it up. As soon as new employees walk through the door, they’re plunged knee-deep in ‘we’ speech. Their onboard training is all about the company and all its fantastic products and services. It’s not even clear where all this navel-gazing is coming from. Sometimes it feels like companies think they need to do this because everybody else is doing it–which I think should be reason enough to go against the grain if you care about that competitive edge at all.

If you want to pique other human beings’ interest, start by asking them a genuine question. If you want them to pay attention to you, you’ll first have to pay attention to them. That’s only fair. So if you want to make a sale, gain the trust of the person sitting across from you. Take an interest in them. Listen. And don’t talk about what you can do for them until they’ve said their piece.

How to have a real conversation?

The ineptitude of companies to talk about anything but themselves is especially visible–sometimes painfully so–when they reach out to prospects. Here’s a classic cold email I found in my inbox. You know the kind.

When during trainings I ask sales and marketing people to write me a cold outreach communication like a call, an email or an invitation, they tend to switch to this remote, robotic tone of voice. It’s like they’ve taken the ‘cold’ in ‘cold calling’ to mean they should sound distant and uninterested. Some know to use your first name, others go as far as to add a couple of personalised lines–but only to switch to robot language with a standardised message after the introduction. You can hardly expect anyone to give you the courtesy of listening if you haven’t put in the effort to talk to them personally.

This is useless. Both are examples of communication that doesn’t offer me, the prospect, any value. Clearly, the authors of both messages have been spamming about and have now landed in my inbox in hopes of being able to offer something, anything, that I might need from them. The first problem here, aside from bad copywriting, is the hit ratio for this type of cold outreach is painfully low. We’ll get back to that later.

The second issue is that these people don’t know how to talk to the world at large. And you can’t blame them. While they’re probably great at stirring up enthusiasm in someone seated right in front of them–they are, after all, sales–they don’t have a clue where to start when it comes to being sociable at a large scale. They simply haven’t been trained for this.

It’s human nature to be reluctant to tout your message through a megaphone, a reluctance that increases as the message becomes more personal. When addressing the world, these sales tend to be shy and retort to preformatted, idiomatic language, because they feel it adds to their importance. It doesn’t. It undermines their authenticity and makes them look distant, disconnected. And that’s very far from the trust they want to instill between them, the guy or gal with a great product or service, and me, their prospect.

So how to fix this? How do you talk to people you have never met, and how do you do this at scale?

The cocktail method

Imagine you’re at a reception and you don’t know anyone there. You feel out of place at first, but quickly, you pick up on hints and adjust to the pace of the room. You grab a glass of champagne, join the queue (there’s always a queue somewhere) and end up either at a table or at the bar to signal for your next glass of champagne. That’s when you spot someone interesting next to you. What do you say to them? ‘Hi, my name is Michael. I am the founder of Chaomatic. We specialise in building your sales machine. We are trusted by 250 companies and counting, so how can I help your business?’

Weirdly enough, though, this is exactly how we behave online. Maybe we write these kinds of awkward LinkedIn introductions because we think it’s what we’re supposed to do. Or maybe we don’t have a clue what to write, so we stick to what we know and we end up talking about ourselves, sounding like a letter from some government department.

Just because I’m asking you not to speak like you have a broom up your derrière doesn’t mean I want your cold emails to read ‘Hi, I’m Michael. Do you come here often? Yeah? What do you think I should order?’ Cold emails aren’t queues at a bar. But I do need you to shift your perspective. Take an interest in the person you’re talking to, and you’ll generate a ton more trust while dramatically improving your overall communication.

Here’s an example of a LinkedIn message I once got after visiting someone’s profile–one that did resonate.

I was impressed. Dennis had won me over in just a few lines. And the way he’s done it works as a template for whatever cold outreach you have planned. Here is a quick rundown of why this one works like a dream.

1.Dennis pays me a compliment, thanking me for checking out his profile. He’s acknowledging my actions. Simple, but effective.

3.Not only is Dennis not asking anything from me, he is actually offering me his network on a golden plate.

4.Next comes the sale, which is very subtly phrased: ‘how we can benefit from each other?’. Here’s a man who understands the power of nuance.

5.To finish it off–always secure your next step!–he’s letting me plan my own meeting straight into his schedule.

Does it work, you ask? I had a look at Dennis’ LinkedIn profile. In just eight months, he went from 30k to over 68k followers. I’d say that’s a yes. And if you think about it, this is the exact same strategy you’d use at a cocktail party, or to invite that one saucy-looking stranger on a date.

Get over yourself

I know, it’s hard to take that first step and it’s hard to convince yourself that you actually have something interesting to say. You’re still somewhat reluctant. That’s exactly why you are your biggest problem. I’m no life coach, but I know this much: the only way to get over yourself, is to get over yourself. Try things. Play around. Have fun.

Don’t let me tell you you’re good at what you do. You know you are. You know you have the knowledge. And you know you want to grow your business. And you will–that’s not the issue here. The question is when. But then, if you already know you’ll end up aiming higher, if your growth is unavoidable, then why wait? Why not go for it right now?

It’s time. Challenge yourself. Find your limits. Get past them. Get out there. And get crackin’.