Why it’s important and how you can do it
Your professional brand will benefit from focusing on your ideal customers—and why you choose to serve them.
In old-school marketing, branding was about creating a look that would appeal to customers and prospects. It was about developing messaging that would sell product. While it was also about helping prospects get to know what a business did, it wasn’t so much about communicating the company’s why or higher purpose.
Today’s best professional brands are still about creating a look and messaging that helps to drive sales and career success. But professional branding is now focused squarely on who you serve and why. It’s about helping prospects get to know you and how you are uniquely poised to help them. It’s about showing them why you are uniquely poised to guide them in transforming themselves—and the world.
How can you make the shift from having a sales mindset about your professional brand to having a mindset grounded in service?
At Revealing Genius, we recommend first spending time to “excavate” who you are—and why you do what you uniquely do. Next, we recommend getting to know—deeply—your ideal customer or prospect so you can serve them in ways that help them make a key transformation. Finally, we suggest learning how to tell the world concisely and in very personal ways about your reasons for serving your ideal customers.
Interestingly, developing a service mindset will ultimately help you attract more clients, drive sales and achieve career success!
Excavate Your Professional Brand
We talk a lot at Revealing Genius about our time-proven ETA™ process for executive personal branding. And that’s because it works.
The first step in this process, “excavate,” is key in shifting to having a service mindset about your brand. When you excavate your brand, you’re uncovering what makes you you—different from anyone else out there who seems to do the same thing that you do.
A key aspect of the excavate step in the ETA process is refining your understanding of why you do what you do. Your “why” will point to the transformation you (and only you!) can help your clients make. Your why also will point to the big, hairy audacious change you’d like to see in the world.
When you excavate your professional brand, you’ll learn a lot about who you are at the core. This may seem like it has nothing to do with sales. But at the same time, we’ve seen over and over that people who know their why see their businesses grow!
The Revealing Genius blog includes a lot of posts with tools you can use to excavate your unique why—and thereby build a service mindset for your professional brand. For example, check out this post for more: Creating Your Professional Brand Is Easier When You Know Your ‘Why’.
Get to Know Your Beloved Avatar—Deeply
Sometimes when I ask people who they serve, they say, “Well, people, of course.” And that’s a right answer that benefits from adding more details.
In these cases, I’ll follow up with questions like, “Who—specifically—do you serve?” “What is special about them?” and “Why do you find it so important to serve them?”
When you answer these questions, you’ll take your professional brand from a sales to a service mindset—because you will learn how you aspire to facilitate a transformation for your ideal customers or clients, your “beloved avatar.” Through that transformation, you and they will change the world for the better. This is the kind of inspirational thinking that ultimately propels a brand forward toward success.
Check out this blog for more: Build Your Professional Brand on a Deep Understanding of Who You Serve.
Tell the ‘Why’ of Your Professional Brand
We talked earlier about the time-proven ETA process that Revealing Genius uses. Going through the second step, “tell,” is key to shifting your brand from a sales to a service mindset.
In the “tell” step, we help clients learn how to talk clearly and concisely in every communication channel not only about what they do but why they do it.
For example, one downsized executive learned to talk about her passion for the idea that women elevating other women is a pathway to transforming the world for the better. She now owns the phrase “gender multiplier effect.”
In another example, a chief operations officer learned to talk with leaders about how she could transform their workplaces by engaging their team members. When she told stories about how she had done so successfully in the past, she was hired on the spot, in the middle of the pandemic.
When you can articulate in every situation how what you do helps transform individuals and better the world, you’ve got a service mindset about your brand—the kind of service mindset that will drive sales and help you reach your next career milestone.
Get more on how you can talk about your professional brand from a service mindset in this blog: Want to Share Your Personal Brand Message Effectively and Confidently?
We love to see business leaders in healthcare and other arenas move from a sales to a service mindset about their professional brands. In addition to reading our blog, you can get many more resources for your professional brand journey by signing up for our 45-minute complimentary webinar, our 7-Day Summit, RG365 membership daily emails or 1:1 sessions. We look forward to seeing your success.
