Personal brand and the pitch

I have been going through really interesting and useful training at the moment on building relationships. As part of this the conversation turned to personal brand.

Have you considered how your personal brand affects your ability to pitch and to manage your relationships (privately and professionally)?

Going beyond the obvious effects of a strong personal brand bringing higher levels of awareness and attraction for your brand, how does your brand translate in a pitch situation for example? Imagine if you decided that your personal brand essence was Presenter Extraordinaire and you delivered a lame deck of clip-art embellished Powerpoint slides.

Authenticity in personal branding is just as important in personal branding as it with organisational brands.

Without it, you cannot establish credibility and therefore Trust.

And without trust you can rarely access deeper levels of a relationship necessary to create long-term, result-generating relationships with clients. Nic from Six Degrees talks about building strong relationships built on a deeper understanding a client and their business for a pitch using a circle of 5 stages - compile information, connect, clarify needs, compel and complete.

The trust equation we talked through was one I have referred to previously:

Trust = credibility + reliability + relationship
-------------------------------------------------
self-orientation

Trust enables you to increase the information you gain about the business and the key people involved through the compile and connect stage, making your understanding of both what they need and how they need it presented deeper and more accurate. The fundamental of great pitches!

If you think from a clients' perspective, rating your relationship on a scale from 0-10 on each of these...how would you perform? And how can you continue to integrate this useful measure of your relationship (and indirectly your personal brand), on an ongoing basis? Even better - do it with the client! What a great way to objectively discuss your relationship and show the client how important they are to you.

Measuring once tells you what is, measuring on an ongoing basis will help you shape what the relationship will be, hand in hand with the client.

Thanks Nic - fabulously practical and thoughtful tips.

For more information on personal branding, you can explore Dan Schawbel's Personal Branding Blog or read through Dr. Hubert Rampersad's article on Brand channel on Personal Branding. There is a lot of articles and blogs which discuss personal branding, some with more authenticity than others.

No time to read up? Try this: write one phrase that describes the essence of who you are and will be perceived. Mine for example is Curious Thinker. Then write your values (I aim for no more than 5 for the sake of clarity) that support this essence. You can also do it the other way around if this makes things easier for you. I recommend you leave it for a day / week and come back to it. Does it still resonate? If so, articulate some behaviours that support the values. For example, One of my values is challenging, the behaviour is questioning. It is these behaviours that will ultimately translate into you communicating your own brand with authenticity.

flickr photo credit: lucam