299: Controlling Your Public Image As A Salesperson

<p>In the good old days we could have multiple public personas in sales.  We could be the professional salesperson, but that image was entirely separate to our family life.  We could enjoy boozy celebrations and getting off our face with relative anonymity.  We could accumulate customer complaints and deal with them in private.  We could rely on word of mouth from within a limited circle of acquaintances.  When we met people for the first time, they basically knew almost nothing about us, except the name of our company and any reputation that brand name had in the market.</p> <p> </p> <p>Times have changed haven’t they.  I was reminded of this fact recently.  I host a weekly podcast called Japan’s Top Business Interviews where I interview leaders about one topic – leading in Japan.  Through a mutual contact, a young man about to graduate from Temple University sought my advice on his speech at the Commencement Ceremony as the student body representative.  In the course of that conversation with him he told me he had already chosen a prominent American insurance company to work for, entirely based of the interview I did with the CEO.  Separately, two other leaders here mentioned to me that when they were interviewing people to work at their companies, the candidates mentioned they had listened to their interviews with me before the job interview.  Potential clients reach out to me, because I am producing a prodigious amount of content spread across the six podcasts and three TV shows I release each week.</p> <p> </p> <p>My point is never before have salespeople had the opportunity or the risk of having everything out there in social media about them, quite easily discoverable, before meeting with the prospective client.  Buyers do check us out, in the same way that we check them out.  Naturally they are looking for red flags and we are looking for commonalities, so that we can create solid connections with them.</p> <p> </p> <p>This means we need to carefully curate our social media information and image.  There a