I was listening to the Sales Influence podcast today and the episode features Victor Antonio talking with Will Barron. At one point in the episode, Victor talks about how he would call potential prospects and if he was leaving a voicemail, he would end with “just Google me.”
I was thinking about how powerful this really is. It seems kind of like the new business card, but even better. It’s not saying “here’s a link to my website,” or “call me if you need more information,” it’s just “Google me.”
Basically, you have made yourself a big enough deal in the field you are working in that you know if they Google your name, the first thing that they see is going to be exactly what you want them to see. Your website, your LinkedIn, your podcast, or whatever it is. You brand yourself so well that you are confident when someone goes and looks up your name that they will find you.
As Will says, just hope your name isn’t Tony Robbins or you’re completely screwed. At that point, you might as well change your name.
However, just because you are the first 15 results doesn’t mean it helps you. What do those first 15 results say about you? Does it give them a sense of confidence that you are both highly qualified in your field and that you are doing what you do to increase value for people like them?
The truth is, in the B2B world, these people are getting hounded from salespeople all the time. multiple people a day are calling them trying to sell them something. By creating that online presence, you create for yourself yet another avenue for reaching your potential clients.
In the podcast, Victor talks about the “moment of truth” idea and how there is a new strategy that has come about in recent years. It used to be something like this:
1st moment of truth – See commercial for the product.
2nd moment of truth – Go to store and see product in person
3rd moment of truth – Buy and bring home product from store and try it.
Boom. Those were your three moments of truth.
But now there is a new moment of truth that has been introduced to the game:
0 moment of truth – Found your product online.
And in many ways, this is the most productive moment because it is automatically going to increase your potential to have clients coming to you vs having to reach out to them.
Victor mentions that he has 13 books and over 500 videos online talking about sales. He has clearly branded himself as a sales expert, and he no longer has to cold call others because they come to him.
So, all of this seems really big, right? Like, how on earth could you ever get to that point? And your dream isn’t to be this big sales influencer anyway, you are just going to work in your company. No need to go crazy with your personal branding if you’ll be wearing the company brand, right?
Here’s the thing, your personal brand is always important. If you’re trying to get these conversations with these CEO’s to tell them about your company’s product, what if that CEO or someone working for him looks you up? What if they can’t find anything on you? Then they don’t know if it’s worth their time. They’re not sure what kind of conversation it will be.
On the reverse side of this, if they look you up and your brand screams “I HATE MY JOB AND ONLY DO THIS FOR THE MONEY!” This will probably dissuade them even faster from going through with a meeting with you. However, if you brand yourself as a respectable person, who is passionate about what you’re doing, who is competent in your role and has a great understanding of the work that you do; that is a very good signal to a CEO, and they now can have some confidence going into the meeting knowing that it will at least be done with someone who seems to know what they’re talking about.
The next step is to get Google to show exactly what you want. Because of this, I am going to spend the next few weeks digging into SEO and learn all that I can about it. I would love to make it so that when people type in “Joey Wickham”, the first 5 results are exactly what I want them to see.
I don’t have enough knowledge (more accurately, I have no knowledge) in SEO to make a challenge for myself just yet, but once I have a better understanding of how it works and how much control you have over it, you can expect me to come back with a challenge for myself.
This will help me, but it will also allow me to gain some useful skills for when I work for a company and am trying to help them appeal to the audiences that they want to appeal to.
In a few month time, I want to be able to tell people “just Google me” and from there they can find out everything I want them to know about me.
Here’s the link to the podcast episode that inspired my thoughts on this subject: Sales Influence Ep. 178